Posted on 10/23/2012 5:06:43 PM PDT by Morgana
WASHINGTON, D.C. October 22, 2012, (LifeSiteNews.com) – Three years after she appeared to endorse the eugenic aspects of abortion, a new report claims Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has backpedalled from the remarks that created an uproar in 2009.
“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,” Ginsburg told Emily Bazelon of the New York Times in 2009.
In a new follow-up piece, Bazelon writes that Justice 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).” Ginsburg said in the interview for Slate conducted last Thursday, that her remarks had been “vastly misinterpreted.”
However, none of the quotations Bazelon reproduces in her new article address Ginsburg’s controversial reference to “growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of.”
In the article the justice says, as she did in 2009, that she was surprised by the 1980 Harris v. McRae decision, which “said it was OK to deny Medicaid funding for even therapeutic abortions.”
“At the time, there was a concern about too many people inhabiting our planet. There was an organization called Zero Population Growth. 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,” she said.
Although the justice, who was appointed to the Supreme Court by President Bill Clinton, apparently did not clarify which “populations” the nation sought to suppress, Bazelon seemed convinced Ginsburg was not motivated by the chauvinism of the early Progressive movement.
“To imagine that Justice Ginsburg would endorse eugenics as a motivation for supporting legal abortion, you have to be out to get her,” she wrote. “In the end, if [Ginsburg’s] concern has a legacy, it’s in the promotion of contraception.”
However, critics of the remarks observed that they fell in line with a long eugenic tradition of endorsing birth control and abortions as methods of keeping “unwanted” or “inferior” populations in check. The foremost promoter of contraception in U.S. history, Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger, called for the sterilization of “genetically inferior races” and believed that “all our problems are the result of overbreeding among the working class.”
Ironically, Ginsburg’s original 2009 interview discussed misstatements. “Think of how many times you’ve said something that you didn’t get out quite right, and you would edit your statement if you could,” she said.
Referring to Sonia Sotomayor‘s statement that “a wise Latina with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male,” Ginsburg said, “I’m sure she meant no more than what I mean when I say: Yes, women bring a different life experience to the table…That I’m a woman, that’s part of it, that I’m Jewish, that’s part of it, that I grew up in Brooklyn, NY, and I went to summer camp in the Adirondacks, all these things are part of me.”
Ginsburg’s legacy on the court has been as one of the most outspoken pro-abortion opinions. She told the Aspen Ideas Festival in 2010 “we will never go back” to prohibiting abortion.
Ginsburg is the oldest justice on the Supreme Court at 79. The next president is expected to alter the balance of the Supreme Court, appointing anywhere from one to four justices.
Good God! This is just damn chilling to read!
This is thinking right out of the dammed 3rd Reich. Coming from a UNITED STATES SUPREME COURT JUSTICE. This wicked woman should be impeached(and then deported) immediately!
I am so sorry people like this only surface think. It doesn’t sound like they investigate too much.
I wonder if these people have thought to themselves what if their parents had aborted them. There would have never been any kind of opinions from them. I am not saying anything personally about them; but compassion for your fellow seems to really be missing. Only party and politics first thinking. Very sad.
Why would she back pedal? it’s not like she faced any pressure to recant from her friends and allies.
Unbelievable. A Jew said this. One of the most disturbing movies I ever saw was WE ARE THE SMOKE. It was about an uprising at one of the Nazi death camps. The title was about how the Nazis turned Jews into smoke. Perhaps someone should make a movie called WE ARE THE LANDFILL about how the Democrats turn babies into garbage.
“This is thinking right out of the dammed 3rd Reich.”
Not only is it scary - she’s an idiot. If one is concerned about overpopulation you should be killing the breeders.
I don’t know much about the history of abortion - I wonder how much of it WAS/IS based on the “overpopulation” fears? I always figured it was for more selfish motives of getting in the way of fun and a woman’s career.
There have been strong suggestions that Ginsburg would never resign during Obama, because she believes that he would give “her seat” to somebody deeply offensive to her, like a Muslim, but a Republican president would appoint somebody on the grounds of their being a good jurist.
Ginsburg is just another elitist ZPG’er that would like to thin the herd of useless breathers. Her buddies in the NYT obviously didn’t edit her previous comments enough as some of her real beliefs slipped through the media filter.
Ginsberg (and leftists) unmasked!!!
On blacks, immigrants and indigents:
“...human weeds,’ ‘reckless breeders,’ ‘spawning... human beings who never should have been born.” Margaret Sanger, Pivot of Civilization, referring to immigrants and poor people.
http://www.dianedew.com/sanger.htm
Ginsberg (and leftists) unmasked!!!
On blacks, immigrants and indigents:
“...human weeds,’ ‘reckless breeders,’ ‘spawning... human beings who never should have been born.” Margaret Sanger, Pivot of Civilization, referring to immigrants and poor people.
http://www.dianedew.com/sanger.htm
*
I hate to defend Ginsburg, but she was stating a fact, not giving her opinion.
I was attending a snotty medical school full of upper class elite types, and it was indeed true that a lot of our professors and students supported abortion to stop the “wrong type” from having so many babies.
I am part Irish, so I know that Margaret Sanger gave out birth control to stop the stupid Irish (and Jews) to stop them from having so many babies, so it’s not new, and I’m sure Ginsburg was aware that her grandparents also would have been included among the “non desirables”...
At her core, a progressive is a utopian. She envisions a perfect world, which can only be attained by the elimination of those who would not fit in.
There will be some SCOTUS retirements between Zero’s involuntary retirement (although it’s tough to retire when one has never had a job) and Romney’s inauguration. Thanks Morgana.
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