Abortion and the echo of eugenics

Boston Globe ^ | July 26, 2009 | Jeff Jacoby

[MartinaMisc]

WHAT DO Richard Nixon and Ruth Bader Ginsburg have in common?

Not much linked the former president, who died in 1994, and the associate justice now in her 17th year on the Supreme Court. But each was in the news recently with a cringe-inducing comment about abortion. Those comments are a reminder of the ease with which educated elites can decide that some people’s lives have no value.

Nixon was meeting with an aide in the White House on Jan. 23, 1973, when the conversation - recorded on tapes newly released by the Nixon Presidential Library - turned to the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision the day before. Though generally against abortion, Nixon said it was “necessary’’ in some cases, such as interracial pregnancies. “There are times when an abortion is necessary. I know that. When you have a black and a white,’’ he explained. “Or rape.’’

Ginsburg’s words were even creepier.

“Reproductive choice has to be straightened out,’’ she said in a recent New York Times interview. She was referring to the Hyde Amendment, which bars the use of Medicaid funds for abortions - a law the Supreme Court upheld in Harris v. McRae in 1980. “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. . . But when the court decided McRae, the case came out the other way.’’

Populations that we don’t want to have too many of - who would those be, exactly? Minorities? The poor? The handicapped?

[shibumi]

Like I was sayin’.....

[Neidermeyer]

Significant because it appeared in the Boston Globe ... No link to O’s thoughts on the issue however.

[Jacquerie]

Justice Potter Stewart of Roe v. Wade infamy also saw abortion as a population control device and that it had nothing to do with the Constitution. They all knew they were making a political rather than judicial decision.

Our Founders made the courts appointive positions for life for the very purpose of keeping judges out of politics. The Left eventually soils every institution it controls.