Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Poor People Should Have Abortions, Not Children

National   |   Steven Ertelt   |   Sep 24, 2014   |   3:28PM   |   Washington, DC

The headline for this article may seem controversial, but that’s another way to state the pro-abortion views Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg spouts in a new interview.

“It makes no sense as a national policy to promote birth only among poor people,” Ginsburg says.

This isn’t the first time she’s sounded in favor of eugenics. Ginsburg caused a stir in July 2009 when she made comments about the Roe v. Wade abortion case that appeared racist. In an interview with the New York Times, Ginsburg said made it appear she supported Roe for population control reasons targeting minorities.

ruthbaderginsburgRoe is the 1973 Supreme Court decision that, along with Doe v. Bolton, allowed virtually unlimited abortions for any reason throughout pregnancy.

Ginsburg first advocated taxpayer funding of abortions and followed it up by saying she backed Roe to eliminate “populations that we don’t want to have too many of.”

Pro-life writer Mollie Hemingway has an excellent write-up on the new interview and what exactly Ginsburg said;

Five years ago, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said the most fascinating thing in a candid interview with Sunday New York Times Magazine reporter Emily Bazelon:

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.

Excuse me? Populations that we don’t want to have too many of? Eugenics doesn’t really sound any better — indeed, it sounds a great deal worse — when it’s coming from a media-beloved Supreme Court Justice. My favorite part of the interview was that Bazelon didn’t even pause for a second. Just went on to her next question. Bazelon later said, unconvincingly, that she thought Ginsburg was just saying that other people had wanted Roe because they were eugenicists, or something.

I thought of all this when I read through another interview with Ruth Bader Ginsburg. You know how you have friends who complain about a super-old relative who just starts spouting racist stuff and can’t be quieted down? This is what interviews with Ginsburg remind me of. Also it doesn’t help that she keeps falling asleep during important speeches and oral arguments and just doesn’t care. I’m not saying she’s just like a crazy old racist great-aunt who keeps embarrassing us and we can’t do anything about it, but that’s basically what I’m saying.

Anyway, in an interview with Elle, she says her kid and grandkid don’t get how awful it would be to not have legal approval for snuffing out one’s growing baby in the womb. And then when she’s trying to say that protections for unborn children hurt poor women more than wealthy women since wealthy women can just pay the baby away, she lets that old eugenics thing slip again:

It makes no sense as a national policy to promote birth only among poor people.

I get that Ruth Bader Ginsburg is one of the most important champions of abortion and that those people who think people should be able to end some lives after they’ve begun just love her to pieces. And I get that the birth control and abortion rights movements have always had deep ties to eugenics, population control, and master race-type stuff. I get all that.

But it’s all kind of unseemly, no? It would be one thing if she were talking about the importance of promoting birth among all groups of people as a way of affirming the sacredness of life or what not, but her long-standing focus on how some “populations” shouldn’t be encouraged to have babies and should have subsidized abortion is beyond creepy. We get it, RBG, your social circles think life would be so much better if you didn’t have to deal with those awful poor people and their unapproved backgrounds and living conditions. But you’re supposed to be a tad bit better in covering up those motivations, mmmkay?

Previously, Ginsburg complained that the decision in the Roe v Wade case that allowed virtually unlimited abortions was too overreaching. She grumbled that it was decided in such a way that it made for an easy target for pro-life advocates complaining about its extremity. Ginsburg told students at Harvard earlier that Roe should have been argued incrementally.