It’s no secret that Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is a staunch supporter of legalized abortion. What is not as well known are Ginsburg’s somewhat disturbing ideas about abortion’s nexus with the subject of population control, which Mollie Hemingway looks into over at the Federalist.
In an interview published this week by Elle, Ginsburg argues that access to abortions should be readily available to both poor and rich women, but more so the former because they can’t afford the cost of a new child. “It makes no sense as a national policy to promote birth only among poor people,” the Supreme Court justice says.
In a 2009 interview with the New York Times, Ginsburg had this to say about abortion and population control: “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.”
“[I]t’s all kind of unseemly,” Hemingway writes. “It would be one thing if she were talking about the importance of promoting birth among all groups of people as a way of affirming the sacredness of life or what not, but her long-standing focus on how some ‘populations’ shouldn’t be encouraged to have babies and should have subsidized abortion is beyond creepy.”
