Ginsburg I Thought Roe Was to Rid Undesirables
Justice
discusses 'growth in populations that we don't want to have too many of'
Posted: July 08, 2009
9:46 pm Eastern
© 2009 WorldNetDaily
In an
astonishing admission, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg says she
was under the impression that legalizing abortion with the 1973 Roe. v. Wade
case would eliminate undesirable members of the populace, or as she put it
"populations that we don't want to have too many of." (She is speaking about minorities, and in particular blacks
re-iterating Margret Sanger’s
doctrine of birth control and abortion. Abortion is murder,
Abortion is genocide, Abortion has had evil designs since it’s
very beginning in the
Her remarks, set to be published in the New York Times Magazine this Sunday
but viewable
online now, came in an in-depth interview with Emily Bazelon titled,
"The Place of Women on the Court."
The 16-year veteran of the high
court was
asked if she were a lawyer again, what would she "want to accomplish as a
future feminist legal agenda."
Ginsburg responded:
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.
Question: 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?
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.
When pressed to explain what she meant by reproductive rights needing to be
straightened out, Ginsburg said, "The basic thing is that the government
has no business
making that choice for a woman."
Asked if that meant getting rid of the test the court imposed, in which it
allows states to impose restrictions on abortion such as a waiting period, the
justice said she was "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.
Three years ago, Ginsburg received some embarrassing national attention when
she napped
on the bench during a court hearing.
"Justices David Souter and Samuel Alito, who flank the 72-year-old,
looked at her but did not give her a nudge," reported Gina Holland of the
Associated Press.
The incident caught the attention of Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank,
who said:
"At first, she appeared to be reading
something in her lap. But after a while, it became clear: Ginsburg was napping
on the bench. By Bloomberg News's reckoning – not denied by a court spokeswoman
– Ginsburg's snooze lasted a quarter of an hour.
"It's lucky for Ginsburg that the Supreme
Court has
so far refused to allow television in the courtroom, for her visit to the land
of nod would have found its way onto late-night shows."