PrintAugust 22, 2009
Obama, Ginsburg, and the Ghost of Margaret Sanger
From what surely must vie for the title of "Dingiest Gorge in Hell", the perdition bound soul of Margaret Sanger, posthumous Queen of the radical feminist movement, was unbeknownst summoned -- and just as quickly retired to the infernal pit where it likely makes its eternal home -- by a very artless and candid response from Supreme Court Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg, during a recent, hardly publicized, New York Times Magazine interview.
Billed as a serious enquiry into the psyche of the esteemed judge, the interchange consisted primarily of a whole lot of tedious bewailing the female gene's perennial struggle against the oppressive, sexist culture that ostensibly permeates even moderately influential power structures in this country. At times, exposing this presumed, deep-seated, patriarchal impulse of the male species appeared to be the sole objective of the interview.
And then, suddenly, and most unexpectedly, Mrs. Ginsburg yielded a rather frank assessment of the Pro-choice movement's little known history of eugenics.
As civilized people who stumble upon an embarrassing truth and then try to regain their stoic composure, both the Judge and the unsuspecting enquirer continued undaunted on their merry way to discuss matters of more practical relevance, without even offering Justice Ginsburg's revealing observation nearly a parting glance.
If for no other reason than to avoid being charged with having unfairly wrenched Mrs. Ginsburg's poorly "calibrated" remarks from their original context, I now present you with the extract, from what was declared by the publisher as an already condensed and edited version of the interview:
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. (Emphasis Mine)
Rarely do proponents of choice offer their adversaries a peek at what their goals really are, especially in this our sensitive age. But Justice Ginsburg's incautious remark succinctly encapsulated the original de facto objective behind the gruesome vision of Margaret Sanger. The latter bore no scruples when outlining her moral obligations as the prime mover of the euphemistically dubbed Reproductive Freedom crusade.
In Sanger's mind, there was never a doubt that abortion -- albeit an abhorrent procedure -- should not only be recognized as the inalienable right of every woman, but that it could also serve as a highly effective tool for fashioning a healthier and more productive society. In terms of methodology, such a goal could be achieved by systematically filtering out the varied ethnic and socio-economic people groups deemed as offering no discernible benefit to the rest of the general population. In fact, the philosophy behind the nascent Pro-choice movement and methods advanced by the architects of the Third Reich's final solution evoke a particularly salient comparison that can not be imputed as being too terribly strained.
Today, Sanger's ideological progeny fail to realize how they unwittingly continue to facilitate the opening of new portals and further expand the nightmarish legacy launched by this proud advocate of Eugenics. A legacy that is clearly outlined in one of her most notorious books "Woman and The New Race", in which she writes about those populations that Justice Ginsburg was alluding to in the earlier passage:
"Among our more than 100,000,000 population, are Negroes, Indians, Chinese and other colored people to the number of 11,000,000...Do these elements give promise of a better race? [and] are we doing anything genuinely constructive to overcome this situation?"
Yet one could say that we have come very far since the days of Margaret Sanger; and indeed we have, now that we have elected our very first African American President.
But this also brings us to the million dollar question, which is: how then does Barack Hussein Obama, (and any other Pro-choice advocate who belongs to a minority group for that matter) justify his support for an ideology which foundational tenets would have decreed him and other struggling minorities -- presumably destined to fill the ranks of the underprivileged -- as parasitical undesirables for whom society has a moral obligation to slate for extermination?
I have a gnawing suspicion that since Obama already has a history of not properly vetting many of his most crucial appointments, chances are he has likewise not bothered to review the nefarious ancestry of this toxic ideological movement he so strongly wants to perpetuate, and which has in fact consecrated the slaughter of millions, continuing to reach far beyond its date of inception.
If he has indeed already done so, then I truly can not fathom why it is he does not appear the least bit inclined to re-evaluate his present stance on the issue of abortion.
