Absolutely stunning. The legacy of Margaret Sanger lives on.
In an interview with the New York Times Magazine that will be published Sunday, but which is online now, Justice Ruth Ginsberg free admits that when Roe v. Wade was decided, she thought it was about the control of "undesirable populations."
To wit:
JUSTICE GINSBURG: Reproductive choice has to be straightened out. There will never be a woman of means without choice anymore. That just seems to me so obvious. The states that had changed their abortion laws before Roe [to make abortion legal] are not going to change back. So we have a policy that affects only poor women, and it can never be otherwise, and I don’t know why this hasn’t been said more often.
Q: Are you talking about the distances women have to travel because in parts of the country, abortion is essentially unavailable, because there are so few doctors and clinics that do the procedure? And also, the lack of Medicaid for abortions for poor women?
JUSTICE GINSBURG: Yes, the ruling about that surprised me. [Harris v. McRae — in 1980 the court upheld the Hyde Amendment, which forbids the use of Medicaid for abortions.] Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of. So that Roe was going to be then set up for Medicaid funding for abortion. Which some people felt would risk coercing women into having abortions when they didn’t really want them. But when the court decided McRae, the case came out the other way. And then I realized that my perception of it had been altogether wrong.
No follow-up on whether Ginsberg, a Jew, thinks it is good or evil to want to control undesirable populations, or what her criteria is for who may undesirable.
Read the full NYT piece.
There is a good analysis at WorldNetDaily.
Fr. Z fisks it also.
Thursday, July 9, 2009
Justice Ruth Ginsberg: Roe v. Wade was for "populations that we don’t want to have too many of."
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11 comments:
If I didn't know you I'd think you were making this up.
I'm not sure exactly what she's saying, though. What perception of what had been wrong? Very muddled.
But of course, the thinking that arrives at this sort of an idea is muddled and dull in the first place. Hannah Arendt called it the banality of evil. In the end the most evil actions happen pushing papers across desks, says Arendt.
Just, wow.
It gets even more jaw-dropping when you realize the small army of editors this goes through before it sees print (or cyberspace). Even at the relatively smallish papers I worked at, anything you wrote would be seen by at least a half dozen people before reaching the press. A paper like the Times has legions of city editors, metro editors, managing editors, not to mention all the copy editors, typesetters, and graphic artists, who read and re-read all copy. Either none of them care, or the word came down from on high: it runs as is. We don't need any Dawn Edens injecting any standards into this.
Plus, this is such a huge Journalism 101 moment: "Student, you get a D- on this story because you left a hole big enough to drive a truck through. Call the source back and ask at least five follow-up questions."
There is just something very, very wrong here, over and above Ginsberg's Eugenics sympathies.
Justice Ginsberg's perception was absolutely right. It just so happens that the decision went the other way. Racism has always been the unspoken motives of the left. Now the are being spoken.
Sean,
Quick, Friday's half over, and no Belloc!
Any excuse to bump that wicked old crone from the top!
Sean,
A Path to Rome quote at your fingertips. I'm impressed.
Now treat yourself to a cigar and glass of burgundy to celebrate Friday.
Hilaire would expect nothing less!
Dunno. I think this is not quite the call to Armageddon everyone thinks it is.
Everyone in the catholic blogosphere is hammering away at the sentence you've bolded, Sean, and ignoring the context of the question and answer. Seems to me what she's saying is that in 1973 there was concern about the growth of the numbers of poor. Not Jews, not blacks. The poor. And it's true, there was concern about that. Then she goes on to say she was wrong.
I'm not defending her as a jurist, but she's said and done plenty of truly wrong things without us jumping all over this one thing that doesn't seem so bad actually.
Yes, Gary, but is she saying that Roe v. Wade was meant to help get rid of the poor? (Which would be utterly frightening.) And does she endorse such a position? And she says she is wrong in the context of the SCOTUS upholding the Hyde Amendment, but she does not say whether she thinks that was good. All we know for sure is that she thinks Roe was good.
And this all points to how creepy this article is: her statement is screaming for follow-up questions. And we get none.
No, I think she's saying that it was meant to help prevent an increase in the number of poor, which is something different. Remember when this happened. The Great Society programs had not yet been discredited; many people thought that it would be possible to actually eliminate poverty with the right application of federal money, and that was the goal they were working toward. I remember being taught so.
Anyway, she's talking about the McRae ruling. She says she was surprised because she thought Roe was going to be used as a tool to help prevent growth of certain populations; the context makes it clear she's talking about the poor, not necessarily any racial group. Then she explicitly says her perception was wrong.
This doesn't make her a saint, and I don't deny the eugenic mentality behind the abortion industry. I've just been puzzled at the reaction here and elsewhere, that it's some kind of damning indictment of a eugenic agenda. I don't see that in the plain meaning of her words.
But I don't think I made it clear enough that I strongly condemn the attitude that treats human populations as things whose growth is to be controlled, as though we were talking about cultures of bacteria. And I think this attitude underlies much of the mentality that championed Roe at the time, and which we see reflected in Ginsburg's reminiscence.
It is often defended in terms of social engineering combined with the responsibility of leaders to create the best outcome for those goverened. But who decides what's best, now that God has been evicted from the public square and we no longer have a common understanding of the Good as lying somewhere outside of ourselves?
Could "politicians" be one of those populations we don;t want too many of?
Pleeeez?
Careful there, Tim. I sympathize with you, but you sound like one who thinks a Ring of Power will solve all his problems.
'k?
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