Justice Bader Ginzberg And Eugenics

ere’s what Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine: “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.”...The comment, which bizarrely elicited no follow-up from Bazelon [the interviewer - ED] or any...other major news outlet — was in the context of Medicaid funding for abortion. Ginsburg was surprised when the Supreme Court in 1980 barred taxpayer support for abortions for poor women. After all, if poverty partly described the population you had “too many of,” you would want to subsidize it in order to expedite the reduction of unwanted populations...Left unclear is whether Ginsburg endorses the eugenic motivation she ascribed to the passage of Roe v. Wade or whether she was merely objectively describing it. One senses that if Antonin Scalia had offered such a comment, a Times interviewer would have sought more clarity, particularly on the racial characteristics of these supposedly unwanted populations....Ruth Bader Ginsburg and a Question of Ethics, Jonah Goldberg, National Review, 7/15/2009

Those who know the history of contraception advocacy in the early 20th century know that the Leftist saint, Margaret Sanger was unabashed in her desire that birth control be a means to limit minority populations, especially blacks and eastern Europeans. George Bernard Shaw, another founding socialist (or Fabian) in Great Britain, said very nearly the same thing, suggesting a more than casual relationship between socialism and the national socialism of Hitler. One hopes that a century later that a Supreme Court Justice, in expressing a similar sentiment, was only reflecting a serious illness, not her judicial opinion.

Luther