Friday, July 10, 2009

What did Ginsburg Mean?

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Roe V. Wade:

Ginsburg: Yes, the ruling about that surprised me. [Harris v. McRae - in 1980 the court upheld the Hyde Amendment, which forbids the use of Medicaid for abortions.] 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.



When she says 'populations we don't want to have too many of,' who is this 'we'? Is she using the first person plural on purpose, including herself? OR is this rhetorical?

Over at Reclusive Feminist, a 'reader' (comment 106) offers a different take than the one that first seems obvious to me:
I suspect you are misunderstanding what Ginsburg is saying. She uses “we” to mean she thought that was a commonly held view, when she said: “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.” And then she says she was wrong about what the commonly held view was. She is not saying SHE wanted abortion to reduce growth in “populations that we (”we” being what she thought was a commonly held view, not HER view) don’t want to have too many of”

In other words, she though the prevailing views of those in power were in favor of slowing population growth, and also racist eugenicists. She’s not endorsing the later. But then she says she was wrong, that wasn’t the prevailing view, the prevailing view was that the govt shouldn’t pay for abortions. But that is not her view, as you can see from the previous paragraph, where she says:

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. 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.

I understand her point to be that she thought the govt was going to fund abortions in part for bad reasons, and that was a huge problem, but she was wrong about where the problem was. The problem turned out to be that the govt didn’t want to fund them at all, the opposite of the problem she expected to have to fight, forced abortions.



If that's what she means, then I am a little chilled..

If she means she thought that OTHER people were in favor of Roe V. Wade because they wanted certain undesirables to practice abortion in larger numbers in order to reduce the surplus population- why didn't she ever call them out? Is she really saying that she thought many of her pro-choice comrades, or at least pro-choice people in government were pro-choice to further a eugenics-based agenda? That's pretty horrific, since she apparently never said a word about this publicly before. If you thought a group in power were furthering the same ends as you for the purpose of the destruction of group of people on the basis of race and/or class, wouldn't that make you re-examine what you were doing? Distance yourself from them on principle? Warn the communities those powerful politicians wished to destroy that they were targets and not allies?

And if she made such a horrible mistake about the motives of others, why? How did that happen? And why didn't she discuss it with them rather than waiting several years for another court case to reveal that she had misjudged their motives so grieviously?

blog comments powered by Disqus