Pro-Lifers Intently Watching Confirmation Hearings.

As NRL News went to press, we were only days away from the start of confirmation hearings on the nomination of Judge John Roberts to replace Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, who is retiring after 24 years on the Supreme Court. Although the rhetorical temperature has been relatively mild, compared to the scalding attacks by pro-abortionists on Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas, it remained an open question whether the language of opponents of the 50-year-old Roberts would assume a white-hot ferocity as the Senate Judiciary Committee conducts its deliberations.

Going into the hearings, which began September 6, the clearest example of a baseless, inflammatory attack was the now-infamous ad aired by NARAL and pulled after only a few days. In a McCarthy-esque guilt-by-association assault, NARAL took Roberts' legal arguments made in the 1991 Supreme Court Bray v. Alexandria Women's Health Clinic case and spliced them together with a picture of an abortion clinic vandalized nearly seven years later (in a different state) to suggest that Roberts was soft on abortion clinic bombers.

The ad's narrator intoned ominously, ''Supreme Court nominee John Roberts filed court briefs supporting violent fringe groups and a convicted clinic bomber." The ad concluded that Roberts must be opposed because ''America can't afford a justice whose ideology leads him to excuse violence against other Americans."

The truth was entirely different. In Bray, attorneys for the Virginia abortion clinic argued that such demonstrations amounted to a conspiracy to violate the civil rights of women, citing an 1871 statute used against the Ku Klux Klan. In his role as deputy solicitor general, Roberts told the High Court that this federal law couldn't serve as a legal basis because protesters did "not aim their anti-abortion activities exclusively at women" but "at anyone ... involved in the abortion processdoctors, nurses, counselors, boyfriends, husbands and family members, staffs, and others." The Supreme Court agreed 63.

As FactCheck.org concluded in its withering critique, ''In words and images, the ad conveys the idea that Roberts took a legal position excusing bombing of abortion clinics, which is false. To the contrary, during the Reagan administration when he was Associate Counsel to the President, Roberts drafted a memo saying abortion-clinic bombers 'should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.' In the 1986 memo, Roberts called abortion bombers 'criminals' and 'misguided individuals,' indicating that they would get no special treatment regarding requests for presidential pardons. Reagan in fact gave no pardons to abortion-clinic bombers."

Criticism was so intense that NARAL's communications director resigned in the aftermath.

While pro-abortion groups and their allies conceded this was a setback, in the ensuing weeks they ratcheted up their opposition, sometimes explicitly criticizing Roberts on abortion, other times on "privacy," still other times on a myriad of other issues.