Posted by
Scott Ott on Thursday, July 09, 2009 11:49:56 AM
Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg Excerpt:
"Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe [v. Wade] was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in
populations that we don’t want to have too many of [emphasis mine]. 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 [Harris v. McRae — in 1980 the court upheld the Hyde Amendment, which forbids the use of Medicaid for abortions.] , the case came out the other way. And then I realized that my perception of it had been altogether wrong." -- New York Times,
Place of Women on the Court
Justice Ginsburg was appointed to the Supreme Court by President Bill Clinton in 1993. In 1973, when the Roe v. Wade ruling legalized abortion nationwide, Ms. Ginsburg was an attorney active in so-called reproductive rights issues. If I understand her remarks to the NY Times correctly, Ms. Ginsburg thought a contributing factor to the Court's Roe decision was concern for too much population growth among "populations that we don't want to have too many of."
I'll grant the possibility that she may have been stating this ironically or tongue-in-cheek...not expressing her own misgivings about the multiplication of certain undesirable populations.
Nevertheless, it's startling to consider that a practicing, liberal feminist attorney could labor for seven years under the misconception (puns intended) that a Supreme Court ruling was, in part, an expression of judicially-sanctioned racial discrimination (or at least of socio-economic discrimination). One would think that Ms. Ginsburg and her colleagues would have taken to the streets in defense of poor, minority women whose wombs had suddenly become chambers of ethnic cleansing. They did not protest.
However, the ethnic cleansing continues to this day, with black and Hispanic babies aborted in numbers all out of proportion to their representation in the general population. They fall victim to knives wielded by inevitably white abortionists.
If I have misinterpreted Justice Ginsburg's remarks, then I can only note that a person who makes her living through specificity in written words may occasionally lack the power of precision in spoken words.
Or perhaps she said exactly what she meant.