Rose Fradusco Alito gave birth on April Fool's Day, 1950. Hundreds of women would die that year from botched illegal abortions in the United States, where the procedure had been widely banned for decades. But here in the Alito household in suburban New Jersey, all was grand. Rose thrilled at new motherhood. She was a schoolteacher, then a principal. Her husband Sam was a teacher too, then a director in state government. Their son, named after his father, would go on to do important things someday; Rose could feel it. When she died in 2013, Samuel Alito Jr. was all grown up, with a big fancy job on the U.S. Supreme Court.
It's unlikely that Rose ever considered abortion for herself (a few years before she passed away, she told reporters she opposed it). But what if her circumstances had been different—if her own life had been endangered by the pregnancy or if the fetus had a fatal anomaly or if Rose simply hadn't been ready for a child? What if she'd had a choice and access to safe, legal abortion care? Nearly 75 years later, in a reproductive rights landscape that feels like it's sliding back in time, one group decided to channel this policy fantasy into a new health care enterprise named in her honor. |
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