By: Mike Duffy

In a July 9, 2009, interview with the New York Times, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg advocated for Medicaid funding for abortions and indicated that she “thought that at the time Roe [v. Wade] was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of”.

What exactly was Justice Ginsburg talking about? Was Roe really about population control and, more importantly, which groups of people, according to Justice Ginsburg, are too populous?

On September 30, two student groups, the Black Law Students Association and Jus Vitae, co-sponsored a screening of the recently released documentary Maafa 21: Black Genocide in 21st Century America. Maafa is a Swahili word meaning tragedy or disaster and is often used to refer to the “African Holocaust” or “Holocaust of Enslavement”. The film addresses, at length, the racism at the core of the eugenics and birth control movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and investigates their roots, development, and aspirations.

Among the documentary’s many revelations is the fact that Margaret Sanger, the founder of what would become Planned Parenthood, was very much an advocate of eugenics. She promoted the sterilization of those she considered “unfit”, believing that doing so would be the “salvation of American civilization”. Sanger stated that “[e]ugenics seems to me to be valuable in its critical and diagnostic aspects, in emphasizing the danger of irresponsible and uncontrolled fertility of the ‘unfit’ and the feeble-minded establishing a progressive unbalance in human society and lowering the birth-rate among the ‘fit’”. As explained in the film, eugenicists often disguised their actual goal of eradicating African Americans by claiming their targets to be the “unfit” and “feeble-minded.” No doubt eugenicists believed African Americans to be unfit and feeble minded, but still felt that euphemisms made their work more palatable to others.

The documentary concluded by highlighting the devastating legacy of eugenics, birth control, and abortion among African Americans. In reality, Planned Parenthood—the nation’s number one abortion provider—has 78 percent of its offices located in minority communities and while African Americans constitute 12 percent of the U.S. population, they constitute 35 percent of U.S. abortions. Approximately 1,452 African American babies are aborted every day, meaning that at least 13 million have been aborted since 1973. In fact, as explained in the film, abortion has killed more African Americans than have cancer, diabetes, heart disease and gang violence combined.

Now it seems a little clearer as to whom Justice Ginsburg was referring.

For more information about the film, visit Maafa21.com.

Mike is a 3L and can be reached at forum@valpo.edu.