There was an interesting article in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine that was mostly Q&A between Emily Bazelon, a Slate senior editor and member of the faculty at Yale Law School, and Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The conversation takes an unexpected turn when Bazelon asks Ginsburg what, if she returned to lawyering, she’d want to accomplish as a future feminist agenda. Ginsburg responds:
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.
Um … did she just say what I think she did? Does that mean Ginsburg subscribes to the “Freakanomics” theory of why crime rates dropped in the ‘90s?
(Hat tip: My colleagues at GetReligion)
