With his appointment of Dawn Johnsen, a former NARAL attorney, as the Assistant Attorney General for the Office of the Legal Counsel, pro-life advocates already know they are getting an abortion advocate in the position. But, Johnsen goes further and views pregnancy as slavery.
Johnsen is a professor at the Indiana University School of Law, but she is also a longtime abortion advocate and worked for one of the leading abortion advocacy groups.
Johnsen was the Legal Director for NARAL from 1988-1993.
In an article at National Review, Andrew McCarthy describes the importance of the Office of Legal Counsel.
“OLC, a critically important agency, is the administration’s lawyers’ lawyer,” he says. “It authoritatively interprets the law for the attorney general and, in doing so, drives administration legal policy.”
“OLC’s credibility is derived from its reputation for apolitical, academic discipline — its commitment to informing policymakers of what the law is, rather than what staffers believe the law should be. Johnsen is, for that reason, a poor fit: She is an ideologue, and an unabashed one,” he explains.
McCarthy says that Johnsen’s view of pregnancy as slavery wasn’t just an off-the-cuff remark.
“It was her considered position in a 1989 brief filed in the Supreme Court,” he explains, and the legal papers she filed concerned a Missouri law banning taxpayer funding of abortions.
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.
“The Court rejected this farcical theory, just as it has rejected other instantiations of Johnsen’s extremism,” McCarthy explains in his National Review column.
“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.”
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