Paul Ehrlich Helped Create Roe v. Wade: Justice Blackmun echoed the Population Bomb’s concerns about “population growth,” and Ehrlich thought Roe supported “compulsory abortion.” (Josh Blackman, 3.17.2026, reason)
Justice Ginsburg spoke to those concerns in a 2009 interview:
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. Which some people felt would risk coercing women into having abortions when they didn’t really want them. But when the court decided McRae, the case came out the other way. And then I realized that my perception of it had been altogether wrong.
Justice Ginsburg was quite right about how Ehrlich and others viewed abortion. […]
In Ecoscience, published in 1977, Ehrlich invoked Roe to argue that the federal government could impose “compulsory abortion” to reduce the population:
Page 837: To date, there has been no serious attempt in Western countries to use laws to control excessive population growth, although there exists ample authority under which population growth could be regulated. For example, under the United States Constitution, effective population-control programs could be enacted under the clauses that empower Congress to appropriate funds to provide for the general welfare and to regulate commerce, or under the equal-protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Such laws constitutionally could be very broad. Indeed, it has been concluded that compulsory population-control laws, even including laws requiring compulsory abortion, could be sustained under the existing Constitution if the population crisis became sufficiently severe to endanger the society.
Never forget that Roe v. Wade favorably cited Buck v. Bell…
Too many of “them”