Judge Nominated by Obama Argues that Celebration of Motherhood is a Bad Thing

By admin in Politics · July 28, 2013

Nina Pillard, Georgetown law professor and former Department of Justice employee, who has been nominated by President Obama to join the Washington D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, has caused controversy with her views on some topics which some say are feminist and pro-abortion.

 

The Senate Judiciary Committee, who think that president Obama might be trying to bring in more liberal judges to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, grilled Pillard on Wednesday about her nomination.

Senator Ted Cruz of Texas said that he had strict concerns about Pillard’s nomination. He went on to say that Pillard’s views and comments might suggest that she could be considered to be “well outside of the mainstream.”

Pointing to Pillard’s comments in a past abortion case, Senator Mike Lee from Utah asked Pillard if she believed that pro-life protesters were comparable to Ku Klux Klan members who lynched African-Americans just because they were racially different to them and Pillard replied “Not at all, not at all.”

Pillard went on to say to Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa that her personal views would not come into consideration if she was selected to serve as a judge.

However, some Christian organizations are worried about Pillard’s nomination because some of her previous writings have said that abortion is needed to free women from “conscription into maternity.” Pillard also called those who are against contraception insurance coverage a “class of presumptive breeders.”

Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council wrote about Pillard in a recent article that she was a mother of two who had written a paper in 2011 entitled “Against the New Maternalism,” which argued that by the celebration of motherhood, society is creating a “self-fulfilling cycle of discrimination.”

Perkins went on to say “Those ideas bleed into Pillard’s extreme pro-abortion views, which suggest that technology is somehow manipulating Americans to consider the personhood of the unborn.”

Perkins continued that Pillard had even said that the ultrasound was a device to create deceptive images of fetuses that would put people off having an abortion because it gave the impression of an independent human being.

Some believe that Pillard’s nomination might cause a filibuster in the near future and others even question if Pillard is actually needed on the D.C. Circuit Court. According to Grassley, the caseloads on the D.C. circuit are very low and there is doubt whether we need more than eight active judges on it.