Ruth Bader Ginsburg was Many Things—But a Coward was Not One of Them

A recent article in the Quest titled “House of Elvira: The HoEs Kick off Halloween Weekend” covered the House of Elvira’s latest drag show made a throwaway comment that not only blamed Ruth Bader Ginsburg (RBG) for the overturn of Roe v. Wade, but accused her, posthumously, of cowardice. I, like many others whose rights RBG fought the majority of her life to defend, was shocked and disappointed to see this harmful rhetoric in our school’s newspaper. While we will never know whether RBG retiring earlier may have enabled a timely replacement by another liberal Supreme Court Justice, and therefore led to a different ruling in the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, we do know who ruled to overturn this case and we know that it was not Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. 

Although she was a lifelong advocate for abortion rights, Bader Ginsburg argued at the time of Roe’s passing that its reasoning for legalizing abortion was faulty, that the decision was too broad-sweeping, and that it would give anti-abortion activists something to rally against. She argued instead for gradual change to protect the right to an abortion that had a legal foundation rooted in the right of an individual to make choices about their own bodily autonomy rather than a physician’s right to practice and perform certain procedures. Gradual change, according to Bader Ginsburg, that involved state legislatures and courts, would have been more difficult to rally against and therefore to undo. I believe the decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization demonstrates that she was right. 

I understand that many of us are frustrated with this ruling and the disastrous effects it will have on public health, and that some of us are looking for people to blame. May I suggest instead Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett, the men and woman who were directly responsible for the ruling? To place the blame for this ruling solely on a deceased woman who, although of course she was a flawed individual, did nothing but her very best to serve this country and to protect and uphold women's rights is shameful. To place the blame for the overturn of Roe on the head of someone who warned the public ages ago that this was not the way to secure long-term protection of abortion rights is cherry-picking history at worst, and lazy journalism at best. Ruth Bader Ginsburg was many things, but she was not a coward. Instead, we should define her legacy by what she did for us. She championed the Equal Pay Act of 1963, Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, the Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978, the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993, and the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009. While she served on the Supreme Court, she ruled that Title IX could be applied to lawsuits brought against schools for failing to prevent student-on-student sexual harassment in 1999 and in 2005 that it allowed for claims of retaliation against those who had spoken up about sex-based discrimination. Ruth Bader Ginsburg was innovative, resilient, an activist, a pragmatic innovator, a champion of racial and gender equality, and one of only nine women in her first-year class at Harvard Law. She was inspiring, she was courageous, and she was brilliant. We owe it to her to remember her as such.