Letter From the UK (About A US Supreme Court Justice)

Ruth Bader Ginsburg, population control and the things we don't admit about abortion 

Tim Stanley
The Telegraph
September 28, 2014

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (Photo: AP).

The cat exits the bag – or, at least, pokes its head out for some air.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a Supreme Court Justice, has given an interview that anti-abortion activists claim expresses eugenicist views. Asked about the impact of abortion restrictions upon poor women, Ginsburg delivered this super-creepy-sounding line:

It makes no sense as a national policy to promote birth only among poor people.

Conservatives infer that she would prefer a policy that discourages pregnancy among the less well-off – a view consistent with a much older "progressive" line on abortion rights. Margaret Sanger, the perversely popular historical midwife of the pro-choice movement, wanted the government to promote contraception as a way of reducing the population density of the poor and the sick – while increasing the power of so-called “thoroughbreds”. If a voluntary approach didn’t work, she was happy to achieve her goals through “a stern and rigid policy of sterilization and segregation”. You might dismiss Sanger’s views as a “product of their time” (just like Nazism) but they’ve not entirely lost their currency. There is a small strain of thinking within US liberalism that obsesses about population control. Jonah Goldberg notes that in 1992, a lawyer wrote to Bill Clinton urging him to rush a new abortion pill onto the market as quickly as possible. He said:

(Y)ou can start immediately to eliminate the barely educated, unhealthy and poor segment of our country… It’s what we all know is true, but we only whisper it… Think of all the poverty, crime and misery… and then add 30 million unwanted babies to the scenario. We lost a lot of ground during the Reagan-Bush religious orgy. We don’t have a lot of time left.

Does Ginsburg agree? I’m not altogether sure we can ever really know but it’s worth noting that Ginsburg grew up quite poor – so if she is in favour of reducing the birth rate among that demographic then she would be fool (and this brilliant legal mind is far from a fool). Rather, I suspect that her perspective is that of a feminist liberal who is probably less pro-abortion than she is in favour of equal access to it. Consider something she said in an interview a few years ago that created just as much of a stir. Discussing federal financing for abortions, she reflected:

Frankly I had thought that at the time [that abortion was legalised], there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of.

Understandably, that line outraged pro-life advocates. But Ginsburg wasn’t saying that she was concerned with population control, she was simply saying that she was surprised that – given the popularity of the population control movement in the 1970s – more people weren’t in favour of granting poor women access to terminations via public money. Hence her more recent remark that it’s odd to “promote birth only among poor people”. There’s little to Ginsburg’s record (actually quite a conservative one when it comes to the process of reforming abortion laws) to suggest that she’s in favour of killing the poor. But plenty of evidence, openly expressed, to say that she thinks it’s inequitable to have a policy that lets middle-class women control their bodies but compels working-class women to give birth. In the older interview, she added, “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.” She summed up her own philosophical approach thus: “The basic thing is that the government has no business making that choice for a woman.”

But here’s the paradox. While I am willing to accept that Ginsburg doesn’t personally favour population control of the poor, that’s what the promotion of abortion has historically entailed. In America, this takes on a deeply troubling (and illiberal) racial dimension. A few facts from the International Business Times to turn your stomach:

- In Mississippi, “blacks represent about 37 percent of the population, but comprise 75 percent of abortion patients.”

- Pro-life advocates calculate that there have been around 16 million African-American abortions since 1973. That would amount to about half the population of blacks currently living in the United States and more deaths during that period than from heart disease, cancer, AIDS or violence combined.

- “As of 2006, 50 out of 1,000 black women underwent abortions, according to the Census Bureau, versus 14 for white women and 22 for women of other races.”

I can add to this grisly list the fact that in New York City in 2012, more black babies were aborted than were born – creating a negative birth rate. In other words, pro-choice advocates are highly naïve if they think that legalised abortion automatically liberates the hard pressed or creates a more equal society. On the contrary. If you live in a society where illegitimacy is high, jobs scarce and public welfare ungenerous – it will often be poor women who make the soul destroying visit to the abortion clinic (for evidence of how soul destroying it can be, read this). They will probably not be going out of choice but out of coercion due to financial circumstances. What kind of liberty is that?

Before we can have a proper, intelligent debate about abortion we need first to face up to the reality of what it is. I don’t mean in the “loaded” sense of being about unborn babies with inalienable rights granted by God etc. I simply mean that abortion isn’t entirely safe, it has profound psychological effects, the poor often feel they have no choice but to do it, the pressures of family and society can be great to go ahead with a termination and alternatives are not fully laid out to women.

High abortion rates are the symptom of a society that does not treasure either children or their mothers. Such realities make Ginsburg’s pronouncements on equality appear just as cold as any crank talk about population control.