'We will never go back to the way it once was,' Ginsburg says. Ginsburg: Roe will hold

ASPEN, Colo. — Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg declared Thursday that abortions would continue to be available to women regardless of the legal challenges now being waged by opponents of Roe v. Wade.

"Over a generation of young women have grown up, understanding they can control their own reproductive capacity, and in fact their life's destiny," Ginsburg said in rare public remarks. "We will never go back to the way it once was."


Ginsburg said that any changes in access to abortion simply hurts poor women.

"If people realize that, maybe they will have a different attitude," she said.

In a wide-ranging 45-minute discussion here at the Aspen Ideas Festival, Ginsburg spoke about the collegial relationship among justices on the court, her role in bolstering women's rights, her long ties to nominee Elena Kagan and the recent death of her husband of 56 years, Marty.

On her own health, the 77-year-old Ginsburg said: "I'm just fine," despite being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer last year.

In deeply personal comments, Ginsburg opened her remarks praising her late husband for his open-minded nature, for being a good cook and for being the "smartest man I knew."

Recalling their early times together, she called her husband "the first boy I met that cared that I had a brain." And she noted that when she was in Harvard law school, there were nine female and over 500 male students, and just five female students when her husband was a student there.

The discussion started with an extraordinary introduction by the first woman Supreme Court justice, the retired Sandra Day O'Connor, who said that Ginsburg grew up in an era when women had a hard time getting employment. And she said that Ginsburg is "looking forward to now getting another woman on the court," referring to Kagan, who would join Ginsburg and Justice Sonia Sotomayor if she's confirmed this summer.

Ginsburg told journalist Jeffrey Rosen, who moderated the discussion, that she met Kagan when the nominee was clerking for federal judge Abner Mikva. And she later grew to know Kagan in 1993 when she was nominated to the Supreme Court and Kagan — as a counsel to then-Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Joe Biden — helped him prepare for the hearings by reading all of her past speeches and writings.

"He wanted to appear very well-prepared for the hearings," Ginsburg said of Biden.

Ginsburg later noted how Kagan followed Ginsburg's tack by remaining noncommittal in her confirmation hearings — despite Kagan's 1995 law review article where she harshly criticized Ginsburg and Justice Stephen Breyer for not divulging their views entirely.

Ginsburg said the 50-year-old Kagan had grown "older and wise," and "steered the same course as we did" in her confirmation hearings. And she said she sent Kagan a note saying that the two qualities at the confirmation that would suit her well would be her "patience" and "sense of humor," and Ginsburg said she succeeded at both.

"There's no work place that I find more collegial than the U.S. Supreme Court," Ginsburg said. And she noted the goodwill she received from her colleagues after her first bout of cancer in 1999. At the time, she said, then-Justice David Souter said he would do anything to help her out — so Ginsburg asked him to accompany her to the opera at the Kennedy Center, despite his longtime resistance to going there.

"He enjoyed it enormously, but he never came back," she said.

In private meetings with justices, Ginsburg said, "there's no horse trading" when it comes to deciding on how to vote on cases. But she said justices are "constantly trying to persuade each other" to change their minds.

About twice a term, she said, the final opinion is different from how the justices telegraph their votes in private meetings, making lobbying for votes critical.

But Ginsburg — a fierce liberal on the court — declined to criticize the court's conservative majority, particularly in this year's Citizen United case that opened the door for increased corporate and union spending in elections.

Asked if Chief Justice John Roberts wanted to rule narrowly in cases, Ginsburg said, "I can't answer that question," saying that Roberts and the other justices in the majority in Citizens United believed they were upholding First Amendment rights.