Ruth Bader Ginsburg Quotes
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.
Ginsburg, Ruth Bader. "The Place of Women on the Court." Interview by Emily Bazelon. The New York Times Magazine, 7 July 2009.
At the time India was the second most populous country and had a very high birth rate.
He was referring to Eisenstadt v. Baird in which the court had just ruled on the quoted passage. Some opponents of the Court’s Roe v. Wade decision claim that the opinion came out of left field and had no logical chain from past jurisprudence, but as this quotation pointed out, Roe was the inevitable logical conclusion of an entire line of Supreme Court thinking. Opponents mostly sought reversal on fundamentally moral grounds, not legal.
The logic is that communities and areas—even countries have finite resources. Since we have a welfare society in which we will not allow people to starve, society must provide for children whose parents cannot. Therefore, individuals ought not to be allowed to breed beyond their ability to care for the children for if many would do so, the capacity of the community could be overwhelmed. A middle ground is that while the final decision should be left to the individual family, the society ought to educate and persuade members to limit their breeding.
One of the most contentious activities in all political history is a government trying to regulate the number of children which its citizens can have. When a government tries to do this, they run into opposition by some religious people who oppose birth control in general or some birth control methods (eg abortion). In addition it is opposed by many people who do not want the government involved at all in a decision that is so personal. Yet many governments, under the press of perceived overpopulation, or in an effort to limit mental retardation, have attempted such regulation and that includes the United States where 40 states have at one time or another practiced forced sterilization of people who the state believed were unfit to bear children. China and India—the largest nations of the world—have both maintained government policies and practices to control population with China making it illegal to have more than 1 child. These programs have reduced the population counts, but at a terrible ethical cost and resentment of the affected people.
Joan Ruth Bader Ginsburg was an American lawyer and jurist who served as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1993 until her death in September 2020. She was nominated by President Bill Clinton, replacing retiring justice Byron White, and at the time was generally viewed as a moderate consensus-builder. She eventually became part of the liberal wing of the Court as the Court shifted to the right over time. Ginsburg was the first Jewish woman and the second woman to serve on the Court, after Sandra Day O'Connor. During her tenure, Ginsburg wrote notable majority opinions, including United States v. Virginia (1996), Olmstead v. L.C. (1999), Friends of the Earth, Inc. v. Laidlaw Environmental Services, Inc. (2000), and City of Sherrill v. Oneida Indian Nation of New York (2005).
