WASHINGTON -- Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter yesterday said he will vote to confirm Samuel A. Alito Jr. as a U.S. Supreme Court justice, splitting with other abortion-rights supporters who oppose the nominee because they fear that he would overturn Roe v. Wade, the court's 1973 decision legalizing abortion.

The Pennsylvania Republican announced his position after chairing 4 ¹/₂ days of hearings on President Bush's nomination of Judge Alito, a 15-year veteran of the 3^rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia.

Mr. Specter told reporters after bringing down the gavel that his expectation was, "regrettably, that it's going to turn out to be a party-line vote" in the committee. He said that was a reflection not of Judge Alito's qualifications, but instead of partisan rancor over other issues.

"Politics are pretty heavy in Washington these days," Mr. Specter said. "You can cut it with knife. Independence from the party line is almost nonexistent in this town."

The Judiciary Committee could vote on the nomination as early as Tuesday, although Democrats have indicated that they might seek a one-week delay. A Senate-floor procedural delay by Democrats in the vote on the nomination, called a filibuster, is unlikely.

Even before he disclosed how he would vote, Mr. Specter had been criticized by abortion-rights supporters for not being tougher in his questioning of Judge Alito, who in a 1985 application for a job in the Reagan administration had said he did not believe that the Constitution protected a right to abortion.

As Mr. Specter did last year during the confirmation hearing for now-Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., the chairman questioned Judge Alito on whether he would respect the precedential status of the Roe decision, whose basic holding was reaffirmed by the high court in the 1992 case of Planned Parenthood v. Casey.

Judge Alito acknowledged that Roe was an important precedent, but declined to refer to it as "settled law" and rejected Mr. Specter's description of Roe as a "super-duper precedent."

Mr. Specter said he thought that there wasn't a "dime's worth of difference between what Chief Justice Roberts said and what Judge Alito said."

The chairman's support for Judge Alito did not come as a surprise. On the first day of the hearings, he disappointed some abortion-rights supporters by suggesting that Judge Alito was not a sure vote against Roe, noting that other justices who had criticized the decision before joining the court had later affirmed it.

Mr. Specter also was instrumental in arranging the pro-Alito testimony of seven current or former colleagues of Judge Alito's on the 3^rd Circuit bench. One of those witnesses, former Chief Judge Edward Becker, is a longtime friend of Mr. Specter's.

Yesterday, Mr. Specter reiterated that Judge Alito might surprise his critics in future abortion cases.

Referring to current Justice David H. Souter, the senator noted that "pro-choice" groups "had these big posters, 'Stop Souter or Women Will Die,' a big rally on Capitol Hill at his hearing. And he's become a very strong supporter of a woman's right to choose. Both Justice [Anthony] Kennedy and Justice [Sandra Day] O'Connor were very much opposed to abortion rights. The three of them wrote the opinion" in Planned Parenthood v. Casey.

The hearings ended yesterday with testimony from several outside witnesses invited by the Judiciary panel's Republican and Democratic staffs. They included law professors who supported and criticized the nominee as well as the lawyer for the woman who had sued the Vanguard Group in a case that Judge Alito initially sat on, despite a 1990 promise to the Senate that he would recuse himself from Vanguard cases.

Judge Alito called his initial sitting on the case an oversight, and the matter was later reviewed by a different panel of judges, which came to the same conclusion as the first panel did.

Judge Alito and his committee supporters also maintained that the nominee wasn't bound by judicial ethics laws to recuse himself because he had no financial interest in Vanguard, which merely managed his mutual-fund investments.

But Northeastern University law professor John G.S. Flym, an attorney for Vanguard plaintiff Shantee Maharaj, said that under his reading of federal law, Judge Alito was obligated to recuse himself. He noted that Vanguard in its literature describes shareholders as "owners."

Another witness yesterday was Kate Michelman, former president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, previously called the National Abortion Rights Action League.

"In Judge Alito's approach to the law, there are no individuals, there is no privacy," she warned, " and without them, there can be neither justice nor human dignity."