Rorate Caeli

Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Paragon of Justice -- Catholic Bishop

 From the Bishop of Lexington, Kentucky:



 The late Justice Ginsburg's own words:


 
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. 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.

 

Q: When you say that reproductive rights need to be straightened out, what do you mean?

 

JUSTICE GINSBURG: The basic thing is that the government has no business making that choice for a woman.
[Source: interview to the New York Times, 2009; emphases added]


OR, in her dissent in the opinion (Gonzales v. Carhart) that recognized that Congress could ban the most barbaric of all abortion methods, partial-birth abortion, after speaking nonchalantly on the advantages or disadvantages of killing the baby at once or killing and then dismembering, J. Ginsburg had these words:


 Revealing in this regard, the Court invokes an antiabortion shibboleth for which it concededly has no reliable evidence: Women who have abortions come to regret their choices, and consequently suffer from “[s]evere depression and loss of esteem.” Ante, at 29. Because of women’s fragile emotional state and because of the “bond of love the mother has for her child,” the Court worries, doctors may withhold information about the nature of the intact D&E procedure. Ante, at 28–29. The solution the Court approves, then, is not to require doctors to inform women, accurately and adequately, of the different procedures and their attendant risks. Cf. Casey, 505 U. S., at 873 (plurality opinion) (“States are free to enact laws to provide a reasonable framework for a woman to make a decision that has such profound and lasting meaning.”). Instead, the Court deprives women of the right to make an autonomous choice, even at the expense of their safety

The "autonomous choice" being the barbaric practice of partial-birth abortion.

The Justice furthered no justice -- not at all. It is shameful for a bishop to praise her jurisprudence of horrors.