James Tonkowich
July 16, 2009
Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s comments in the New York Times Magazine on July 12 did not get nearly enough attention.
Ginsburg made it clear that she is a feminist and an enthusiastic proponent of “reproductive choice,” that is, the unlimited right to abortion on demand. The two ideas are, from her point of view, completely intertwined. To be pro-woman demands that you support abortion on demand.
Regarding abortion legislation, Ginsburg is “not a big fan of these tests”—things like waiting periods to ensure that the woman gives her informed consent. These, she charged, put an undue burden on poor women who may need to travel and then spend a night in a hotel to procure an abortion:
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.
For Ginsburg abortion is such an important fundamental right that it should be unencumbered by “these tests”—and Medicaid should pay for poor women to have abortions. The justice went on to claim that Medicaid-funded abortions would have another benefit:
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.
That is, taxpayer-funded abortions make good eugenic sense, in Ginsburg’s eyes. George J. Marlin, writing at TheCatholicThing.org noted:
What a deplorable statement. Unfortunately, the Times reporter failed to ask the obvious follow-up: What populations do we have too many of? Jews? African-Americans? Hispanic-Americans? Catholics? Fundamentalists? The poor? Welfare recipients?
Deplorable, yes, but honest. Abortion has long been viewed as a way to clean out the bottom of the gene pool. The stigma that eugenics has had since the Nazi era has, it seems, begun to wear off.
The same worrisome trend was in evidence on March 27 when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton showed no qualms in accepting the Margaret Sanger Award from Planned Parenthood. Gushing with praise for Sanger, Clinton said:
Now, I have to tell you that it was a great privilege when I was told that I would receive this award. I admire Margaret Sanger enormously, her courage, her tenacity, her vision … And when I think about what she did all those years ago in Brooklyn, taking on archetypes, taking on attitudes and accusations flowing from all directions, I am really in awe of her.
Clinton went on to affirm her commitment to Sanger’s vision, since “Margaret Sanger’s work here in the United States and certainly across our globe is not done.”
Given the nature of Sanger’s vision and work, that is a very good thing. Commenting at allAfrica.com where Clinton and her ilk are seeking to promote Sanger’s vision and work, Nigerian Sonnie Ekwowusi wrote:
[I]t beats the imagination why Mrs. Clinton is putting out late Ms. Sanger as a role model. …She was a racist to the core. …She hated African-Americans. With her eugenic philosophy, Maggie endorsed the murder of the so-called “socially-undesirable” Negroes or black people whom she branded unfit to live. She referred to blacks and Jews as “bad stocks” which should be killed. In her extreme melancholy and sadism, she said in 1921: “eugenics is the most adequate and thorough avenue to the solution of racial, political, and social problems”. Maggie was anti-human.
And that, of course, is the great irony. Ginsburg, Clinton, and others believe that they can be pro-woman while at the same time they support a vision and work that is fundamentally anti-human.
In his new encyclical, Caritas in Veritate, Pope Benedict XVI warns:
[W]e must not underestimate the disturbing scenarios that threaten our future, or the powerful new instruments that the “culture of death” has at its disposal. To the tragic and widespread scourge of abortion we may well have to add in the future — indeed it is already surreptitiously present — the systematic eugenic programming of births.
If there is any good news in all this, it is that Ginsburg and Clinton are being forthright in identifying themselves with the champions of eugenics. The bad news is that their anti-human admissions have in large measure been ignored, provoking neither the fury nor the outrage we should expect from a civilized people.
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