Here’s what Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine: “Frankly I had thought that at the time (Roe v. Wade) was decided,” Ginsburg told her interviewer, Emily Bazelon, “there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of.

The comment, which bizarrely elicited no follow-up from Bazelon or any further coverage from the New York Times — or any other major news outlet — was in the context of Medicaid funding for abortion. Ginsburg was surprised when the Supreme Court in 1980 barred taxpayer support for abortions for poor women. After all, if poverty partly described the population you had “too many of,” you would want to subsidize it in order to expedite the reduction of unwanted populations.

Ginsburg’s certainly right that abortion has deep roots in the historic effort to “weed out” undesired groups. For instance, Margaret Sanger, the revered feminist and founder of Planned Parenthood, was a racist eugenicist of the first order. Even more perplexing: She’s become a champion of “reproductive freedom” even though she proposed a “Code to Stop Overproduction of Children,” under which “no woman shall have a legal right to bear a child without a permit.” (Poor blacks would have had a particularly hard time getting such licenses from Sanger.)

If Ginsburg does see eugenic culling as a compelling state interest, she’d be in fine company on the court. Oliver Wendell Holmes was a passionate believer in such things. In 1915, Holmes wrote in the Illinois Law Review that the “starting point for an ideal for the law” should be the “coordinated human effort … to build a race.”

In 1927, he wrote a letter to his friend, Harold Laski, telling him, “I … delivered an opinion upholding the constitutionality of a state law for sterilizing imbeciles the other day — and felt that I was getting near the first principle of real reform.” That was the year he wrote the majority opinion in Buck v. Bell (joined by Louis Brandeis) holding that forcibly sterilizing lower-class women was constitutional. In recent years, openly discussing the notion of eugenic aspects of abortion has become taboo. But as Ginsburg’s comments suggest, the taboo hasn’t eliminated the idea; it’s merely sent it underground.

To be sure, some heterodox liberals speak up. The writer Nicholas von Hoffman has written: “Free, cheap abortion is a policy of social defense. To save ourselves from being murdered in our beds and raped on the streets, we should do everything possible to encourage pregnant women who don’t want the baby and will not take care of it to get rid of the thing before it turns into a monster. …”

In 1992, Ron Weddington, co-counsel in the Roe v. Wade case, wrote a letter to President-elect Clinton, imploring him to rush RU-486 — a.k.a. “the abortion pill” — to market as quickly as possible.

“(Y)ou can start immediately to eliminate the barely educated, unhealthy and poor segment of our country,” Weddington insisted. All the president had to do was make abortion cheap and easy for the populations we don’t want. “It’s what we all know is true, but we only whisper it. … Think of all the poverty, crime and misery … and then add 30 million unwanted babies to the scenario. We lost a lot of ground during the Reagan-Bush religious orgy. We don’t have a lot of time left.”

“I trust there are many Americans, and at least a few readers of this blog, who do not wish to see South Florida, Southern California, and the Greater New York City area with twice as many people as they have today.”

There’s the real reason behind growth restrictions, building restrictions, and anti-population misanthropic armchair totalitarians like John. The “we got ours now stay out” mentality. Hey, I like my view and such, you peasants just need to stay away in your hovels and leave us superior types to enjoy the good life.

And Natl Geo, sad to say, has become a mouthpiece of far left ideology like global warming and ZPG (still have damned fine photographers though). It’s ironic that the same people bleating about impending doom from starvation and privation are the very ones who try and shut down GMO foods, efficient farming, use of pesticides like DDT, etc., i.e. the very things needed to avert the catastrophe they are whining is imminent. Well, if you put them in charge, the doom and gloom are indeed imminent, due to their actions and policies.

Malthusian “let them eat cake” types, they got theirs, now everyone else need not apply.

John also says “It is a great link, full of hard science and wisdom.”

Bullsqueeze, it’s a propaganda op ed piece masquerading as factual. Funny, several pages of text, and not one footnote or reference listed. Take a look at something like the evil CEI or Heritage Institute put out, extensively referenced and footnoted so you can actually read the sources they used in their conclusion.

The gullibility of the average leftist misanthrop is astounding.

Some of you following this blog might wish to read the recent issue (June? July?) of National Geographic magazine, which has a thoughtful and very factual article on the worsening world food shortage. Please obtain it at your local library. Please see also the link that Fred Magyar usefully included in his posting earlier in this thread. It is a great link, full of hard science and wisdom.

Thanks for listening and good luck to all of you. I’m retiring from this discussion now.

I have seen no indication of much in the way of reasoned thought out of any of your ramblings here. You will never apparently get the fact that the basic core of your ideology is not concern for the environment or people, but control and dictating to people how to live. And believe me, you are a prime example of the type of person who should never be given authority over anything or anyone more than maybe a kitty kat.

I have been to India you twit, and other wonderful garden spots. I saw nothing there to make me think that their lot would be improved one bit by more authoritarianism or the deluded ramblings of another boneheaded liberal Malthusian. But, feel free to go try and sell crazy in India, we have more than enough here.

Oh, and btw, before you wring your little hands raw worrying about world population, you could put all the 6 billion people of the world in Texas and have a population density only a third of Manhatten. We’re obviously doooooomed!

I find your language overly emotional and your two messages to me very largely lacking in reasoned points to which I can even respond. The sheer number of your barbed words is astonishing.

Your “physicist” status does not impress me in the least. I’ve known many scientists who were hateful religious fanatics. I’ll hope you are not that far gone.

A question for you: Why would a policy of 2 children maximum in Bangladesh result in more “death and privation” than the alternative of doing nothing at all? How many people do you want to see in tiny Bangladesh – 200 million? 250 million? 300 million? More? As of today, about 30 million of the 160 million there are starving on a daily basis. And many thousands die needless deaths.

And how many people do you wish to see on the earth as a whole? We’re now at 6.8 billion (way up from about 2.5 billion when you, Severian, were born only several decades ago), and we are expecting to reach 9-10 billion by 2050. Do you want that number to go even higher? 12, 14, 18, 22 billion? Come on, give me a number that you would consider the limit. And then tell me where we would put them all. And please don’t say “in my neighborhood Catholic church.”

Really, Severian, it is a well-established fact that the Third World (not all, but most of it) has the highest fertility rates in the world today, which means that a generation from now we will have a much higher percentage of impoverished, starving people in the world than we have today. That is a horrible prospect.

It is also very unfair of you to lump me in with the radical left. I clearly stated that I was not a lefty.

As for those Third World countries which are now admirably managing to keep their fertility rates down to modest, relatively stable levels (around 2 – 2.5 births per woman), please check “world fertility rates” by country on any number of web sites. There you’ll find some good examples (even our neighbor Mexico is now down to about 2.3), but also many bad examples (e.g., Mali at 7.3!).

Ready for that Indian dream vacation yet, Severian? My $100 offer to you is still open!

And about 8+ out of 10 people I’ve ever run into who buy into this malicious ideology, about how we have to limit population or we’re all Dooooooomed!!! are also the same ones who want animal rights to trump farming, free range this and that, and are against the use of chemicals in farming, and against energy production. So, the very things that are used to feed, cloth, and care for people and are used to prevent the kind of meltdown you dream of, are the things you want to curtail. You want, nay need, a self fulfilling prophecy. I suspect that many of you demented types want to curtail people so you don’t have to eat animals, which is a bass ackwards approach. I’ve noticed that people who want to treat animals like humans also have no problems treating humans like animals, see forced sterilization, and such.

I am really, really tired of insane pseudo-intellectual drivel passed off as “deep thought.”

MD observed “Such as? Let’s have some names, so we can check facts and see just how “wise” these policies actually are. Don’t hold up China as your shining example, since it is a dreamland only for tyrants.”

I suspect, if he can come up with anything at all, it will be one of those countries with staggering childhood mortality due to malaria and other mosquito borne diseases. Gotta keep that DDT banned you know, can’t let the plebs breed uncontrolled. That things like this seem a better solution than trying to lift the people out of poverty and into prosperity thru education and good government (instead of tyranny) says volumes about the morality and ethics of these types.

But, Mwalimu, how can collectivist policies have “destroyed” humankind if humans have always kept bouncing back?

You distorted what I said. I argued that the heavy-handed collectivist politics favored by population control advocates will have destroyed an economy (and, sometimes, much of the population with it) long before overpopulation will. China may have it’s population growth under “control” (whatever that means), but at a horrific cost. I for one have no desire to live in what may be history’s biggest concentration camp.

Your post reflect a serious lack of knowledge of history (not to mention current events). Freedom, once lost, is enormously difficult to get back. Russia now groans under a dictatorship hardly any different from the former Soviet Union. Germany is a free society, but it took a world war to topple Hitler.

I would like to see them tackle the immediate problem of their overpopulation, which would require only a limited effort (e.g., a “2 Kids Max” public campaign), rather than try to turn their entire impoverished country into your dream nation of a “stable, prosperous, advanced, technological” wonder overnight.

“Limited”, eh? Take a look at China, which has a “one child” policy. Not exactly a land flowing with freedom and opportunity! Any government that enforces policies which limit human procreation is by definition a totalitarian government – complete with gulags, thought police, poverty, and (above all) fear. And some folks in this country fear the right-wing Bible-thumpin’ Christianists they profess to see under every bed! What about the population-control advocates actually in the bed?

There are some fine examples of poor Third World countries which, through wise government policies, have already gotten their fertility rates down to the reasonable level of around 2.1.

Such as? Let’s have some names, so we can check facts and see just how “wise” these policies actually are. Don’t hold up China as your shining example, since it is a dreamland only for tyrants.

Incidentally, I challenge you to spend your next vacation in India, travelling widely there, seeing, smelling, and feeling all the squalor and misery and poverty and crowding. I bet you’d be more sympathetic to the idea of sterilization for some people after that. I’ll even give you a hundred bucks if you do go. Deal?

Having lived and taught in a poor African country for nearly a decade, I can answer that. I didn’t just “see, smell and feel” poverty from a hotel room or the back of a taxi – it smacked me in the face every day as I wrestled with it. Safe to say, when confronted with poverty my first impulse was not to say, “This can be solved directly by a wise government policy of population control.” I preferred the indirect method of alleviating suffering. Furthermore, I can assure you that population control is not on the minds of the population in question. Filling their bellies is.

Solving a society’s population “problem” by absolute government control is no solution at all.

You do understand what the “precautionary principle” really means don’t you? It translates into “I wanna force you to do something but I have absolutely no evidence to support me, so I’m gonna attempt to scare you into doing it.”

The thing that so often irritates me about people with your viewpoint is that the things they espouse, allegedly because they are so concerned about these poor crowded masses in poor countries, always, and I mean always, results in death and privation for the very poor they claim to be concerned about. Everything from the idiotic lies about DDT and malaria, to global warming BS that means we have to restrict energy production, everything is geared towards keeping the world’s poor, and pushing the wealthy, into brutish, short, and uncomfortable lives that humanity has spent the past several thousand years working and struggling to put behind us.

The problem with you and your sky is falling fellow travelers is that you seriously need a traditional religion, one that sets up your so obvious desire for original sin, guilt, punishment, and redemption in a way that doesn’t make you gullible for every faddish pseudo-scientific con that comes down the pike, or leads you to work for worsening the human condition.

So, you are not persuasive.

If you will take some time and reconsider the matter carefully, I think your views may change somewhat.

For starters, whether the future floods in Bangladesh will be caused, as you say, by mere subsidence of soil, or, as I and many others say, by rising sea levels, or by both, is a question rather separate from that of its population problem.

But what on earth are 160 million people doing packed together in such a tiny space, exposed to such inundation, whatever its cause? I would like to see them tackle the immediate problem of their overpopulation, which would require only a limited effort (e.g., a “2 Kids Max” public campaign), rather than try to turn their entire impoverished country into your dream nation of a “stable, prosperous, advanced, technological” wonder overnight. There are some fine examples of poor Third World countries which, through wise government policies, have already gotten their fertility rates down to the reasonable level of around 2.1. But we need many more such responsible nations in the world, because the majority still have fertility rates up around 3.0, 4.0, 5.0, and 6.0. India is making some strides toward modernization, but it would take decades more to succeed, and before then their increasing overpopulation problem may breed more chaos and sabotage such modernization. Besides, Severian, you seem to accept the wisdom or necessity of a low (or stable) birth rate, but you want a “changed society” to bring it about discreetly and indirectly. What is wrong with facing the overpopulation threat directly? Incidentally, I challenge you to spend your next vacation in India, travelling widely there, seeing, smelling, and feeling all the squalor and misery and poverty and crowding. I bet you’d be more sympathetic to the idea of sterilization for some people after that. I’ll even give you a hundred bucks if you do go. Deal?

As for Mwalimu Daudi, who is responding to a previous poster, his statement seems self-contradictory: “… our economy … will be destroyed by collectivist policies …. This has always been true in human history.” But, Mwalimu, how can collectivist policies have “destroyed” humankind if humans have always kept bouncing back? It seems to me that excessive collectivism, just like excessive individualism, may spell ruin, but that a balance can be found. I’m a political independent, “liberal” on some issues, “conservative” on others (and wishy-washy on still others). I invite you to join the club.

Sorry, but our economy and its technological achievements will be destroyed by collectivist policies long before we reach this mythical tipping point. This has always been true in human history.

And once again, why are the birth rates so high? Neither place is a stable, mature, prosperous technologically advanced society, yet. India is making great strides towards that goal.

Just another Gore Groupie heard from…Excelsior! Manbearpig is real!

And then consider India. India already has 1.2 billion people. And guess what? Its average fertility rate today is, again, 3.0. That means India’s population is still growing, and rapidly. It is projected to reach 1.7 billion by 2050.

These are just the worst cases of overpopulation in the world today. There are plenty of other runners-up in the race to catastrophe.

Sterilization will eventually be absolutely necessary in some places in order to keep world population in check. Unless, of course, you prefer the natural alternative, mass famines. The only question is: how horrendous will the poverty and overcrowding get before that step is taken?

We have reached that point, and are dealing with the consequences.

We aren’t even close, unless you believe that BS garbage that Al Gore sputters.

The problem is you all just look at the surface of things. There are all sorts of things and possiblities that can be done, and are yet to be discovered. Remember how we were “running out of oil”?? Now we have found reserves that we can get to, that will give us oil for at least 100 years maybe longer. Yet we are running out. The deepest mine ever is a diamond mine that is about 2 miles deep. Figuring the diameter of the earth, off the top of my head, is like 8,000 miles or so, which means we haven’t even scratched the surface of any potential the earth has. In 100 years we went from wind power to steam to diesel to nuclear power ships, what says that in another 100 years we don’t do even greater things.

Why limit us now with this Chicken Little garbage?? Give it up, this is not about care for the earth, it is about controlling people. Yes, let’s conserve where needed, lets recycle what we can, but let’s have a second look at some of this of the people who are in control. Power hungry pukes. The same people who blame a light bulb for our energy problems but yet won’t let us make a power plant until we know for certain that no earth worm will be killed.

Also, isn’t is ironic, how the same people that tell you not to have children, provide a baby factory like our current welfare system. These people are just a joke. – Lorica