-- From "Storm Clouds Gather Over Obama Nominees" by Neil A. Lewis, New York Times 3/31/09
. . . Mr. Obama’s first selection for a federal appeals court seat, David F. Hamilton, and his choice to head the Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department, Dawn Johnsen. (By coincidence, the two are in-laws.)
Ms. Johnsen . . . a lawyer with the National Abortion Rights Action League . . . said forcing a woman to bear a child when she had no desire to do so was “disturbingly suggestive of involuntary servitude.”
. . . at her confirmation hearing on Feb. 25 [Senator] Specter suggested that she had said abortion rights should be protected by the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery. Ms. Johnsen replied that the footnote had made a suggestion of an analogy and that it had mentioned the amendment, but that she had never “believed the 13th Amendment had any role” in the abortion issue.
From "Johnsen's Pro-Abortion Rationale Bizarre" by Ann Shibler, The New American 3/31/09
Johnsen has been only too clear about where her extremist pro-abortion sympathies and philosophy lie. She once served as legal director for the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League (NARAL), the most proactive, abortion-promoting organization in the nation. Before NARAL, she worked in the ACLU’s Reproductive Freedom Project, and also served in the Department of Justice under President Clinton.
In a 1989 case, Webster v. Reproductive Health Services, Johnsen, in footnote 23 of a filed brief, stated:
"The woman is constantly aware for nine months that her body is not wholly her own; the state has conscripted her body for its own ends.... [Abortion restrictions] reduce pregnant women to no more than fetal containers."[In response to Senator Specter's questioning] she responded:
Uh — In footnote 23, I found, makes, um, um, a suggestion that there may be an analogy, um, between, not what the article said, pregnancy, which I’ve been blessed with twice and have two wonderful sons, but forced childbirth. This is a brief that I filed arguing that the right to privacy protects, um the right of women and their families to make these choices and that Roe v. Wade should be upheld, which is in 1989. I made no Thirteenth Amendment argument. I can state categorically: I do not believe the Thirteenth Amendment is relevant at all. It was a straight Fourteenth Amendment argument.[Ms. Johnsen has written:]
The argument that women who become pregnant have in some sense consented to the pregnancy belies reality ... and others who are the inevitable losers in the contraceptive lottery no more “consent” to pregnancy than the pedestrians “consent” to being struck by drunk drivers.This also from the amicus brief she authored in Webster v. Reproductive Health Services. She added, “The experience [of abortion] is no longer traumatic; the response of most women to the experience is relief.”
Johnsen is a promoter of an aggressive liberal pro-abort agenda that has nothing to do with reality or the Constitution, but everything to do with Obama’s redefining of what government is — and will be.
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