The Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday approved Cornelia “Nina” Pillard, President Obama’s most recent nominee for the D.C. Circuit Court. A law professor at Georgetown University and radical feminist, Pillard is known for her flagrant pro-abortion ideology and disdain for motherhood.
The Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing in July to question Pillard on the many controversial positions she holds regarding interpretation of the Constitution, including her view that it grants the right to an abortion.
Pillard was approved on a straight party-line vote of 10-8.
In July, Paul Mirengoff of Powerline explained that it is noteworthy most Republican judicial nominees have had to wait far longer than the two months Pillard waited for her hearing.
“But President Obama needs troops on the D.C. Circuit, which is one of the few entities that constrains his power to rule through executive fiat,” Mirengoff wrote.
Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) said that Pillard’s ideology “shapes and motivates how she sees both the law and the facts in such cases. It is the essence of judicial activism that a judge’s personal and ideological views drive her legal views.”
Pillard is critical of those who oppose the HHS mandate as people who “reinforce broader patterns of discrimination against women as a class of presumptive breeders.”
Having an abhorrence of abstinence education – which she believes is unconstitutional – Pillard insists that it denies equal protection to female students. According to her, abstinence education is a violation of the Constitution because it is “designed not only to expose students to ideas, but also to shape student behavior.”
Life News reports that Pillard has written:
The abstinence-only approach is permeated with stereotyped messages and sex-based double standards about acceptable male and female sexual behavior and appropriate social roles. Public school teaching of gender stereotypes violates the constitutional bar against sex stereotyping and is vulnerable to equal protection challenge.
Steve Ertelt of Life News notes Pillard also wrote that abortion is essential to help “free women from historically routine conscription into maternity.”
Upon Pillard’s nomination, Judie Brown of LifeSiteNews offered:
The level of disdain this woman has for motherhood can only be exceeded by her apparent fascination with divorcing the female gender from any semblance of dedication to that proud profession. This is clear when one reads her Georgetown Law article on reproductive rights in which she states, “We must eschew that shell game because the truth is that reproductive rights are important both for the reasons that the Constitution recognizes liberty rights to privacy and bodily integrity and for the reasons that it recognizes the right to sex equality. Bringing into the picture issues beyond abortion helps to show the close and mutually reinforcing relationship between sex equality and reproductive rights.”
Although Pillard is reportedly a mother of two, Tony Perkins of Family Research Council indicates she wrote in a 2011 paper entitled “Against The New Maternalism” that, by celebrating motherhood, society is creating a “self-fulfilling cycle of discrimination.”
Perkins describes that, in one of her most “jaw-dropping statements,” Pillard even criticized the technological advance of the ultrasound. She said she believes it manufactured “deceptive images of fetus-as-autonomous-being that the anti-choice movement has popularized since the advent of amniocentesis.”
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has not yet set a schedule for a Senate vote on Pillard’s nomination. Pro-life groups are urging opposition to her nomination and support for a filibuster against her.
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