With yet another radical, life-long committed abortion advocate tapped to a high-ranking position at the United State Department of Justice (DOJ), one has to wonder what the Obama Administration’s priorities are when it comes to law enforcement. If this administration were to commission the painting of the President’s portrait, you’d assume they would call on an exceptional artist with a proven record in this area, someone whose work is distinguished in portraits and fine art. They wouldn’t call on a life-long house painter.

Looking at many of President Obama’s nominations, you would think he was staffing Planned Parenthood’s legal staff instead of the DOJ.

Dawn Johnsen, nominated to be the next Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel, is the latest of such nominees. She has dedicated her life to the promotion of abortion without any restrictions. Johnsen, former staff attorney for the ACLU’s Reproductive Freedom Project in New York and former legal director at NARAL Pro-Choice America, even opposes the partial-birth abortion ban, which prevented the gruesome procedure by which a doctor would crush the skull of a baby whose head was just inches from being out of the mother’s womb.

Johnsen is not just “pro-choice.” Plenty of pro-choice people are against the horrible partial-birth abortion procedure. For Johnsen abortion seems to be above all laws, including the Constitution. That seemed clear when in a Supreme Court brief she was willing to manipulate the Thirteenth Amendment, directed towards slavery, to promote a woman’s right to terminate the life of her unborn baby.

She has also adopted a radical view of rights for the unborn saying, “[F]etal rights laws would not only infringe on constitutionally protected liberty and privacy rights of individual women, they would also serve to disadvantage women as women…” Her view is amazingly radical, because while some people believe this way because they argue the fetus is not a child, Johnsen seems to recognize that the fetus is a person, but apparently believes he or she doesn’t have any rights until the mother decides the baby should have them. Here was her written answer to a question submitted by Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Oklahoma):

Sen. Coburn: Is there any circumstance in which you believe that law should recognize an unborn child as an individual, separate from the mother?

Johnsen: I have written a few pieces about how law and policy treat the fetus in cases where the woman has chosen to bear a child. In such cases I have encouraged approaches that do not create an adversarial relationship, but instead … seek to support women in acting responsibly and bearing healthy children. There are situations where the law could and should recognize the fetus, in ways that would not be create [sic] an adversarial relationship but actually support healthy childbearing.

This view is important because as Justice Blackmun acknowledged in Roe v. Wade, “[i]f this suggestion of personhood is established, [Roe’s] case, of course, collapses, for the fetus’ right to life would then be guaranteed specifically by the [Fourteenth] Amendment,” (emphasis added).

But according to Johnsen, the fetus magically becomes a person when the mother wants to have the baby. Essentially you could have two women, both six months pregnant, one carrying a “fetus person” protected by the Constitution because she wants to have the child, and the other one carrying a “fetus blob of tissue” with no rights whatsoever because she doesn’t want to have that baby. Continued...