President Obama Legal Counsel Pick Dawn Johnsen Faces Abortion at Hearing

National   |   Steven Ertelt   |   Feb 26, 2009   |   9:00AM   |   WASHINGTON, DC

President Obama Legal Counsel Pick Dawn Johnsen Faces Abortion at Hearing

by Steven Ertelt
LifeNews.com Editor
February 26
, 2009

Washington, DC (LifeNews.com) — Dawn Johnsen, the pro-abortion attorney President Barack Obama selected to become one of his top legal counsels, faced the issue of abortion at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Wednesday. Johnsen has drawn strong opposition from pro-life groups.

Johnsen, a former NARAL attorney, would become the Assistant Attorney General for the Office of the Legal Counsel if the Senate confirms her nomination.

She is currently a professor at the Indiana University School of Law, but she is also a longtime abortion advocate and was the Legal Director for NARAL from 1988-1993.

Johnsen has come under fire for equating pregnancy with slavery and, ironically, a pro-abortion Republican quizzed her about that during the hearing.

Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, the committee’s ranking Republican, brought up those comments she had made in a 1989 brief filed in the Supreme Court in the Webster case.

In the papers, Johnsen said that any restriction that makes abortion less accessible is, in her view, tantamount to “involuntary servitude” because it “requires a woman to provide continuous physical service to the fetus in order to further the state’s asserted interest [in the life of the unborn].”

In effect, a woman “is constantly aware for nine months that her body is not her own: the state has conscripted her body for its own ends.” Such “forced pregnancy,” she contends, violates the Thirteenth Amendment, which prohibits slavery.

In response to Specter’s criticism, Johnsen dismissed her pregnancy-slavery contention and said it merely came in a footnote in the legal brief. She claims she never “believed the 13th Amendment had any role” in the abortion issue.

In an article at National Review, Andrew McCarthy took Johnsen to task for the comparison.

"The Court rejected this farcical theory, just as it has rejected other instantiations of Johnsen’s extremism," McCarthy explained.
"In reputable private law offices and U.S. attorney’s offices throughout the country, adult supervision would prevent such a lunatic analogy from finding its way into a letter to a lower-court judge, much less into a Supreme Court brief," he added. "Obama, however, is proposing that Johnsen be the adult supervision at Justice. He would fill a position calling for dispassionate rigor with a crusader for whom strident excess is habitual."

After she worked with NARAL, Johnsen served in the Clinton administration as the Acting Assistant Attorney General heading the Office of Legal Counsel from 1997-1998 and as Deputy Assistant Attorney General from 1993-1996. She also served on the Clinton transition team in 1992.

Wendy Wright, the head of Concerned Women for America, told LifeNews.com that Obama’s selection reveals a lot about his pro-abortion views and that Johnsen should be disqualified because of her work with a leading abortion advocacy group.

“NARAL’s obsession with abortion skews its legal positions, blinding it to the Constitution’s equal protection for all human beings," she said. "The fact that Ms. Johnsen worked for NARAL is a huge black mark against her judgment and exposes her bias."

"Americans will not be able to trust that Department of Justice’s legal opinions or Obama’s executive orders comply with the Constitution when the lead person for making that judgment is incapable of treating all human beings with respect," she added.

Johnsen is part of the long pro-abortion record Obama has compiled as president.

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