While browsing my news feed on Facebook today, this article from the Tulsa World posted by OK4RJ caught my attention. In it Jonah Goldberg, author of the dubiously-titled book Liberal Fascism, wonders whether Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has eugenic sympathies based on a quote from a recent New York Times interview. As usual, actually reading the quote in context helps clear things up. Here is her entire statement about the court's 1980 decision to uphold 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."Goldberg conveniently omits the last three sentences in his article. In context, Ginsburg is merely admitting that she initially perceived possible eugenic motives behind Roe v. Wade but now thinks that perception was "altogether wrong." Still Goldberg uses this opportunity to discuss Planned Parenthood's less than admirable history and imply that Ginsburg's initial perception of Roe v. Wade was correct.
Bringing up Margaret Sanger's ties to the eugenics movement and then implying that modern day Planned Parenthoods have similar goals is a common tactic of anti-abortion advocates. I'm not denying that Sanger was a racist. She promoted birth control not as essential to a woman's reproductive freedom but as a way to curb "racial degeneration" in society. The latter was a much less controversial way to talk about birth control, but it's clear Sanger did not link the birth control movement with the eugenics movement for purely political reasons. She did differ from her eugenicist colleagues in that she thought racial deterioration was caused by social factors not biology.
For this reason, I think it's unfair for conservatives to say that Margaret Sanger's goal in establishing birth control clinics was to eliminate minority populations. Law professor Dorothy Roberts provides a more nuanced view of Sanger in her book Killing the Black Body. She describes Sanger as:
"motivated by a genuine concern to improve the health of the poor mothers she served rather than a desire to eliminate their stock...Sanger nevertheless promoted two of the most perverse tenets of eugenic thinking: that social problems are caused by reproduction of the socially disadvantaged and that their child-bearing should therefore be deterred. In a society marked by racial hierarchy, these principles inevitably produced policies designed to reduce Black women's fertility. The judgment of who is fit and who is unfit, of who should reproduce and who should not, incorporated the racist ideologies at the time."Sanger may not have been an outright bigot, but it's hard to deny that her family planning policies negatively affected Black women. Still it is dishonest for Goldberg to invoke this history, take Ginsburg's quote out of context and use them both to accuse her and other abortion rights supporters of being racist. I don't deny that there are people who would promote abortion to further racist eugenic aims, but even Ginsburg, who was initially a skeptic, does not believe that this is what was taking place in 1973.
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