Ginsburg: Roe about eliminating unwanted populations
The NY Times carries this unbelievable interview with Justice Ginsburg that includes this:
Q: If you were a lawyer again, what would you want to accomplish as a future feminist legal agenda?
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.
WorldNetDaily: Ginsburg: I thought Roe was to rid undesirables
4 Comments
Oh, this Ginsberg “story.” I think your “interpretation” was completely disingenuous and intellectualy lazy. You’d have more credibility if you at least the illusion of literacy.
How far is Justice Ginsburg from that old white man, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and the seven white men who joined him in saying, in Buck v. Bell, 274 U.S. 200 (1927), the following regarding the forced sterilization of the mentally retarded:
“We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the State for these lesser sacrifices, often not felt to be such by those concerned, in order to prevent our being swamped with incompetence. It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes. … Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”
I seem to remember that Adolph Hitler espoused a similar rationale to justify the “final solution’ of the Holocaust. In that case and the present one those being killed needed more effective advocacy and defense,
Nowhere does SHE say SHE believes there are undesirables to be rid of.
She says she thought that’s what Roe was originally about. And some in the “choice” community did use that argument.
Nowhere does she say she espoused it.
What have Christians to do with gratuitous character assassination? What have Christians to do with pretexts for condemnation?
Shame.
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