How many is too many of the populations we don't want to have too many of?

Justice Ginsburg In Context
By Michael Gerson (Friday, July 17, 2009)

The New York Times Magazine printed a candid interview with Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, including this portion:

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 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."

. . . At the very least, Ginsburg displays a disturbing insensitivity to Supreme Court history. It was Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. who wrote the 1927 decision approving forced sterilization for Carrie Buck -- a 17-year-old single mother judged to be feebleminded and morally delinquent. "It is better for all the world," ruled Holmes, "if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind." Such elitism has been discredited; it is not extinct.

. . . But there is another view of the disadvantaged found on the left (and not only on the left). Instead of especially valuing the experience of the disadvantaged, some hope that public policy can thin their ranks. This is no longer pursued through the eugenic decrees that Holmes admired but through the advocacy of Medicaid abortions.

"Welcome to the Monkey House"
by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (1968)

[page 28] So the World Government was making a two-pronged attack on overpopulation. One pronging was the encouragement of ethical suicide, which consisted of going to the nearest Suicide Parlor and asking a Hostess to kill you painlessly while you lay on a Barcalounger. The other pronging was compulsory ethical birth control.

[page 34] "[J. Edgar Nation, the inventor of ethical birth control,] didn't have the slightest idea his pills would be taken by human beings someday," said the Foxy Grandpa [who was Billy, the political dissident in disguise]. "His dream was to introduce morality into the monkey house at the Grand Rapids Zoo. Do you realize that?" he inquired severely.

[page 36] "When [J. Edgar Nation] got through with the monkey house, you couldn't tell it from the Michigan Supreme Court."

[page 45-46] "They're bad laws," said Billy. "If you go back through history you'll find that the people who have been the most eager to rule, to enforce the laws and to tell everybody exactly how God Almighty wants things here on earth--those people have forgiven themselves and their friends for anything and everything. But they have been absolutely disgusted and terrified by the natural sexuality of common men and women.

"Why this is, I do not know."