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Mainstream media ignores astonishing comment by Ruth Bader Ginsburg on eugenics and Roe v. Wade
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The mainstream media has been missing in action once again, by completely ignoring an astonishing comment made by Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg concerning the ostensible reasons — in her opinion, rooted in eugenics — for the ruling in Roe v. Wade.
During an interview conducted by the New York Times in her chambers, when questioned about the significance of Roe v. Wade within the context of reproductive rights and feminism, Ginsburg had this to say:
Q: If you were a lawyer again, what would you want to accomplish as a future feminist legal agenda?
JUSTICE GINSBURG: 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.
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?
JUSTICE 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.
Here is the link to the condensed and edited version of the interview posted on the Times web site on July 7th. Decide for yourself what Ginsburg meant.
The larger question is why hasn't this provoked any curiousity among the mainstream media? Why have her comments been blithely ignored?
Are Ginsburg's comments an indication that she approves of the Roe v. Wade decision as an expedient manner by which to curb the population growth of classes of people deemed undesireable? Which populations does she deem "undesirable" and why? What was the context in which she used the phrase? Do Ginsburg's comments not satisfy the threshold standard of what consitutes a story? Are her comments, whatever the context in which they were made, not sufficiently newsworthy so as to invoke discussion and/or commentary on the part of the media?
It is somewhat distressing, but wholly predicatable, that not one major newspaper had seen fit to ask these rudimentary questions. Can you imagine what the reaction among the press would be if Justices Scalia, Roberts or Alito had made a similar comment? A media firestorm would ensue. Where is the natural inquisitiveness of journalists on this story? At the least, the very least, Ginsburg's comments should warrant a discussion concerning in what context her comments were made. But to date, there has been no follow-up on her staement.
As Damian Thompson of the UK Telegraph notes:
What the heck is going on here? What are we to make of the media’s complete silence on this issue? They don’t see a little eugenics between friends as a big deal? They thought it was taken out of context?
As the large metropolitan newspapers die, they’re wondering why. This is why.
Fair point. You might think the New York Times might want to trumpet its exclusive. But the mindset of that pompous, prickly, boring, self-regarding publication is so overwhelmingly liberal that it didn’t even realise it had a story on its hands.
As they bemoan the decline of their profession, journalists constantly remind us that they are indispensable guardians of our precious liberties in a free society. They fancy themselves as speaking "truth to power" by acting as a bulwark against government overreach, corrruption and abuses of power. The fact that the very provocative comments of a siting Supreme Court Justice to date, have not warranted any further inquiry by mainstream journalists, is perhaps one of the reasons why their cries of "indispensability" have largely fallen upon deaf ears.
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