Ginsburg and abortion

After the death of Judge Ruth Ginsburg, American liberals worry that Trump will appoint another conservative judge. In the Supreme Court, and so now, the preponderance is in the conservative direction, and this will aggravate it. The consequence of this would be a possible revision of the “right to abortion” enshrined in the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. Astrologers have announced a month of jokes about “bless the fruit” and other creative references to Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.

However, interestingly, Ruth Ginsburg herself criticized the same decision in Roe v. Wade. American libertarians write about this (they generally recalled Ginsburg both good and bad there). And you can read more in the lecture of 1993. Jane Rowe is a woman who did not want to have a third child, but the Texas statute forbade her to have an abortion (the only exception was life-threatening cases). Wade is the state’s attorney. When the case went to the Supreme Court, seven to two judges decided that the Texas statute violated the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which guarantees equality before the law to all (“no one shall be deprived of life, liberty, and property, except in accordance with the lawful procedure”). The statute in this sense violated women’s privacy without any legal procedure.

What are Ginsburg’s claims? As far as I understand, she says that the court should have settled on the repeal of the Texas draconian law and similar ones. But he went further, establishing regulations on where and how abortions could be restricted. It literally rewrote every state law on the topic that existed at the time. And laid the foundation for the confrontation that rages to this day. The 1992 decision (Planned Parenthood v. Casey) imposed some restrictions compared to the original Row-Wade, but recognized the connection between a woman’s ability to control her reproductive function and the ability to take part in the social and economic life of society.

In general, Ginsburg’s stance on abortion seems to be that control over reproduction is not just “privacy to the body.” By depriving women of such control, you deprive them of control over their lives in general: the ability to make plans, work, study, etc. (pregnancy destroys any plans). Then she refers to a case where a woman was fired from the army because of her birth (although they are not fired because of paternity), in order to show that we are talking about social restrictions, not biological ones. I must say, there really is more logic in this than in the banal “my body is my business.”

Mihail Pojarsky 2020-09-23