by Steven Ertelt | Washington, DC | LifeNews.com | 10/23/12 12:31 PM
Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader 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.
Roe 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.”
“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,” she said then.
Reporter Emily Bazelon then asked Ginsburg a question about what she meant and Ginsburg responded that the 1980 Harris v. McRae ruling upholding the Hyde amendment, which prohibits federal taxpayer funding of abortions, surprised her.“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,” Ginsburg said.
Now, Bazelon has written a follow up article, in which she reports Ginsburg “made it clear today that the issue she had in mind when we spoke in 2009 was concern about population growth among all classes (and races).”
“Emily, you know that that line, which you quoted accurately, was vastly misinterpreted,” Ginsbug said. “I was surprised that the court went as far as it did in Roe v. Wade, and I did think that with the Medicaid reimbursement cases down the road that perhaps the court was thinking it did want more women to have access to reproductive choice. At the time, there was a concern about too many people inhabiting our planet. There was an organization called Zero Population Growth.” She continued, “In the press, there were articles about the danger of crowding our planet. So there was at the time of Roe v. Wade considerable concern about overpopulation.”
