Thanks to Chuck Serio, we learn that Indiana law professor Dawn Johnsen, President Obama's nominee to head the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, is "shocked" at her own words: that "involuntary pregnancy" is slavery.
During questioning by Sen. Arlen Specter, the professor professed to be “shocked” by my contention that she had once analogized pregnancy to involuntary servitude, a violation of the Thirteenth Amendment’s prohibition of slavery. I made this contention in a profile of Johnsen for the current (March 9) issue of National Review, which was posted on NRO on Monday.
I think the shock is on the other foot, for two reasons. First, Johnsen did make this jaw-dropping argument to the Supreme Court. And second, in her hearing testimony, she nevertheless flatly denied making a Thirteenth Amendment argument: “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.”
But, as is usual for Democrats, Johnsen lied. She did, in fact, make a Thirteenth Amendment argument that actually giving birth to one's children constitutes slavery if one did not want to be pregnant but couldn't kill the baby before birth.
We've seen this argument all over the blogosphere (most notably, this nutjob, who makes exactly this argument longly and loudly wherever it goes). What's new here, of course, is that we haven't seen someone nominated for a high position make it.
Before getting to that, though, let’s set the stage. Here is what Johnsen argued in footnote 23 of the amicus brief she filed (as the head of the National Abortion Rights Action League) in the Supreme Court’s 1989 case Webster v. Reproductive Health Services, 492 U.S. 490 (1989) (No. 88-605):Statutes that curtail [a woman’s] abortion choice are disturbingly suggestive of involuntary servitude, prohibited by the Thirteenth Amendment, in that forced pregnancy requires a woman to provide continuous physical service to the fetus in order to further the state’s asserted interest.
This line of argument was not an aberration. It is consistent with a major theme of the brief, to wit, that abortion restrictions result in “forced pregnancy” and government “conscription” of the woman’s body for its own purposes. Thus, for example, Johnsen wrote elsewhere in the brief: “[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.” Consequently, she concluded, abortion restrictions “reduce pregnant women to no more than fetal containers.
Needless to say, this line of horse hockey has been difficult for Johnsen to defend, thus her assertion that she didn't make this argument. Unfortunately for her, no amount of "um"-ing makes up for the fact that she has, in fact, argued that constraints on abortion--any constraints, mind you--are comparable with slavery. And liberals wonder why we think they are extremists?
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