July 12, 2010

By Dave Andrusko

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Whenever anyone mentions the Aspen Institute's annual "Ideas Festival," I can't help but think of that line ad libbed by the bogus Wizard of Oz to explain why he is leaving Oz: "To confer, converse, and otherwise hob-nob with my brother wizards." Over the last few days word has seeped about a 45-minute speech pro-abortion Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg gave last week as she hob-nobbed at the Ideas Festival, and they are most interesting.

The main thrust of Politico's coverage is in the headline--"Ginsburg: Roe will hold." They then quote the 77-year-old justice as saying, "Over a generation of young women have grown up, understanding they can control their own reproductive capacity, and in fact their life's destiny," adding, "We will never go back to the way it once was."

Writing on the DailyBeast.com, Lloyd Grove gave a lot more context and a different spin as indicated by his headline: "Ruth Ginsburg's Abortion Worry." To be clear, Ginsburg is confident Roe will hold indefinitely. Her worry is that if there were any change it would affect only poor women, not the affluent women in her audience. I wonder if she would make the same response if she knew that in New York City, black women have more abortions than live babies.

In Part One, I talked about the pro-abortion response to last week's "Friday Night Lights" episode. One thing I didn't mention is that a pro-abortion columnist for the New York Times reviled a soap opera for "reversing" an abortion that a character had undergone in 1973 on a program aired four years ago.

Well, "All My Children" is a soap opera and linear plots are not exactly a hallmark of soapies. In her speech Ginsburg revises both history and remarks she made prior to becoming a justice.

Referring to Roe, Ginsburg told her audience, "It wasn't all that controversial. It was a 7 to 2 decision with only two dissenters."

This is laughable inaccurate or, to be gentle, tunnel-visioned. While the decision may have spurred only two dissents on the High Court, the pro-life Movement, as a national movement, was put into motion by the Court's cavalier attitude toward over a hundred years of abortion jurisprudence and the laws of 50 states. Abortion is even more controversial today, as collectively we rethink what Roe has wrought.

Ginsburg herself wrote about the tenuous underpinnings of the Roe decision, prior to coming on the Court. As the pro-abortion Huffington Post put it obliquely in its story, in the past Ginsburg "has evoked worry among abortion activists for her skepticism of the durability of Roe v. Wade's majority decision."

Ginsburg's critique had nothing to do with the correctness of legalizing abortion on demand, only with the idea that in leapfrogging the legislative process, Roe "created an inherently vulnerable precedent," as the New York Times' Linda Greenhouse once summarized it.

All the stories that I read about the speech and the setting suggested it was a love fest between former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, who introduced Ginsburg, and current nominee, Elena Kagan, who was not in attendance. The most amusing quote was Ginsburg's non-sequitor answer to criticism that Kagan had never been a judge. "The very first court that Elena ever argued before was the U.S. Supreme Court, and she was superb," adding, "She was wonderful in every argument she gave."

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Part One