Remember last spring when Hillary Clinton received Planned Parenthood's Margaret Sanger Award?Well, to refresh your memory of that event and to review Sanger's sinister eugenics philosophy, a crass elitism that makes the award such a "badge of odor," check out "Why Did Hillary Clinton's Award from Planned Parenthood Receive No Media Coverage?" from April 3.
But then read this excerpt from Emily Bazelon's interview of Ruth Bader Ginsburg published in the New York Times earlier this week.
Note particularly Ginsburg's remarks about Roe v Wade being designed against "populations that we don’t want to have too many of." Wow. After reading that alarming admission, one is bound to ask themselves, "With such a pompous sense of her own superiority (whether based on class or color, education or economics) and with her embrace of abortion as a means to get rid of the less fit 'populations,' doesn't Ginsburg deserve the Sanger award even more than Hillary?"
Justice Ginsburg (who is Jewish) would undoubtedly break company with Sanger over just which populations "we don’t want to have too many of." For, as is well established, the populations that Sanger believed most needed weeding out were Africans, Slavs, Latins...and Jews.
It's too bad that Bazelon, an outspoken pro-choice reporter who dismisses post-abortion syndrome -- that issue seems to be raised in the last question I reprint here -- didn't pursue the matter further. Just which "populations" was Ginsburg referring to? The poor? That could perhaps be surmised from her immediate reference to Medicaid abortions, but why didn't Bazelon pursue this obviously tantalizing item? Maybe she herself was taken aback by Ginsburg's seeming elitism. Maybe she didn't want to embarrass the Justice by probing or giving her a chance to make it even worse. And maybe she even shares Ginsburg's view.
Anyhow, here's the excerpt.
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.
Q: When you say that reproductive rights need to be straightened out, what do you mean?
JUSTICE GINSBURG: The basic thing is that the government has no business making that choice for a woman.
Q: Does that mean getting rid of the test the court imposed, in which it allows states to impose restrictions on abortion — like a waiting period — that are not deemed an “undue burden” to a woman’s reproductive freedom?
JUSTICE GINSBURG: I’m not a big fan of these tests. I think the court uses them as a label that accommodates the result it wants to reach. It will be, it should be, that this is a woman’s decision. It’s entirely appropriate to say it has to be an informed decision, but that doesn’t mean you can keep a woman overnight who has traveled a great distance to get to the clinic, so that she has to go to some motel and think it over for 24 hours or 48 hours.
I still think, although I was much too optimistic in the early days, that the possibility of stopping a pregnancy very early is significant. The morning-after pill will become more accessible and easier to take. So I think the side that wants to take the choice away from women and give it to the state, they’re fighting a losing battle. Time is on the side of change.
Q: Since we are talking about abortion, I want to ask you about Gonzales v. Carhart, the case in which the court upheld a law banning so-called partial-birth abortion. Justice Kennedy in his opinion for the majority characterized women as regretting the choice to have an abortion, and then talked about how they need to be shielded from knowing the specifics of what they’d done. You wrote, “This way of thinking reflects ancient notions about women’s place in the family and under the Constitution.” I wondered if this was an example of the court not quite making the turn to seeing women as fully autonomous.
JUSTICE GINSBURG: The poor little woman, to regret the choice that she made. Unfortunately there is something of that in Roe. It’s not about the women alone. It’s the women in consultation with her doctor. So the view you get is the tall doctor and the little woman who needs him...
