Tuesday, January 5, 2010

The Terminator

Check this out. It's Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in the NYT Magazine from last summer. She comments on a Supreme Court case which upheld a law (the Hyde Amendment) which prohibited Medicaid funds from being used to pay for abortions. Basically, the case stands for the proposition that a woman may have a constitutional right to have an abortion, but that right does not extend to the government paying for it.

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.

Populations we don't want too many of? Concerns about population growth? Who is she looking to get rid of? It seems that Baby Ruth missed her first calling-as an exterminator.

Abortion has always been framed as an individual right, but Ruthie seems to think it is a collective right (notice the use of the term "we").

Ruthie let her guard down when she told the NYT Magazine her true thoughts on abortion.

And when you realize that those comments are coming from one of the most powerful person's in our government, and that person can hold power for life, it makes those comments very scary.

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