'Populations That We Don't Want to Have Too Many Of'
In an interview with the New York Times magazine, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg raises some eyebrows in a discussion of abortion. Ginsburg opines that if Roe v. Wade were overturned, well-heeled women would still be able to get abortions:
Q: Are you talking about the distances women have to travel because in parts of the country, abortion is essentially unavailable, because there are so few doctors and clinics that do the procedure? And also, the lack of Medicaid for abortions for poor women?
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.Ginsburg's remark about "populations that we don't want to have too many of" is vaguely reminiscent of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes's infamous declaration that "three generations of imbeciles are enough." To be fair to Justice Ginsburg, by "we" she may have in mind society as a whole; and she does go on to justify abortion in conventional terms of "choice" and "sex equality" (though the latter is problematic given that men have no right to choose under Roe and subsequent cases).
Ginsburg also speaks highly of Judge Sonia Sotomayor, although she seems to have gotten one fact about her future colleague wrong: "I think she may be the first justice who didn't have English as her native language." The New York Times reported in 1992 that "because her father spoke only Spanish, Ms. Sotomayor did not become fluent in English until after his death."
But blogger David Bernstein says it's likely that at least two past justices were German-speakers: Louis Brandeis, whose parents were German-speaking immigrants and who attended a German-language elementary school; and Felix Frankfurter, who was born in Vienna and did not arrive in the U.S. until he was 12. Bernstein also notes that Justice Clarence Thomas's first language is Gullah, "an Afro-English creole dialect." Foreign-speaking immigrants have been coming to America and succeeding since long before Justice Ginsburg was alive.
http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB124715167300918369.html
