We need to be careful here. There’s a discussion of this at WDTPRS and one commentator has found a law review article by Ginsburg that suggests that the fear of abortion as eugenics was coming from black leaders she heard in 1971 and that her personal view was not necessarily eugenicist. She does appear to side-step the de facto functioning of abortion as eugenicist as far as blacks are concerned, but on the other hand, the disparate number of black abortions results in large part from the dramatic shift in sexual mores since Roe v. Wade made abortion as birth control possible. How many of the aborted out-of-wedlock black babies would have been conceived had Roe v. Wade not taken place?
It is true that abortion disproportionately kills black babies but it’s effect on “minority” society goes beyond that.
But to attribute eugencist thinking to Ginsburg on the basis of this interview may be premature.
See the comments by James the Less at http://wdtprs.com/blog/2009/07/7143/#comments, with the following quotation from the law review article that she wrote, posted at http://www.blogdenovo.org/archives/63_N_C_L_Rev_375.doc
“In 1971, just before the Supreme Court’s turning-point gender-classification decision in Reed v. Reed, n4 and over a year before Roe v. Wade, I visited a neighboring institution to participate in a conference on women and the law. I spoke then of the utility of litigation attacking official line-drawing by sex. My comments focused on the chance in the 1970s that courts, through constitutional adjudication, would aid in evening out the rights, responsibilities, and opportunities of women and men. n5 I did not mention the abortion cases then on the dockets of several lower courts—I was not at that time or any other time thereafter personally engaged in reproductive-autonomy litigation. Nonetheless, the most heated questions I received concerned abortion.
The questions were pressed by black men. The suggestion, not thinly veiled, was that legislative reform and litigation regarding abortion might have less to do with individual autonomy or discrimination against women than with re-stricting population growth among oppressed minorities. n6 The [*377] strong word “genocide” was uttered more than once. It is a notable irony that, as constitutional law in this domain has unfolded, women who are not poor have achieved access to abortion with relative ease; for poor women, however, a group in which minorities are disproportion-ately represented, access to abortion is not markedly different from what it was in pre-Roe days.”
James the Less then commnted at WDTPRS:
“This may be what she is repeating. Everyone can reach their own conclusions, but I would be cautious. In my view, it doesn’t make her a eugenicist.”