Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

RBG also understood that how pregnant women were treated had to do with sex. Only a woman’s body showed proof of having sex, and only women were punished for having it.

RBG often repeated her mother’s advice that getting angry was a waste of your own time. Even more often, she shared her mother-in-law’s counsel for marriage: that sometimes it helped to be a little deaf.

“The decision whether or not to bear a child is central to a woman’s life, to her well-being and dignity,” she said simply. “It is a decision she must make for herself. When government controls that decision for her, she is being treated as less than a fully adult human responsible for her own choices.”