Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby writes says Justice Ginsberg’s recent comments about Roe v. Wade “are a reminder of the ease with which educated elites can decide that some people’s lives have no value.” Who might she be talking about, he asks: “Minorities? The poor? The handicapped?”

Jacoby says Ginsburg’s words “recall the now-rarely-mentioned obsession with eugenics and the elimination of ‘undesirables’ that animated so many supporters of legal abortion and the birth-control movement.”

Among their ranks, Jacoby counts:

– Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, whose majority opinion in the 1927 Buck v. Bell case upheld the right of state governments to forcibly sterilize “feebleminded” citizens; and

– Birth control activist Margaret Sanger, who advocated for “immediate, stern, and definite” action to solve the “problem of the feeble-minded and the menace of the moron”– those she regarded as the “dead weight of human waste.”

Earlier post here.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 27th, 2009 at 9:44 am and is filed under abortion, commentary, eugenics, law. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.