Trump Administration: We Bar Abortions for Raped Minors Because It's in Their "Best Interest"
By Mark Joseph Stern
DEC. 21, 2017, 4:58 PM
It is the official policy of the Trump administration that undocumented minors in federal custody may not obtain abortions, even if their pregnancies resulted from rape. In March, the Office of Refugee Resettlement announced that the federally funded shelters that hold these minors may not take “any action that facilitates” abortion without approval from ORR Director Scott Lloyd. An anti-abortion activist, Lloyd has refused to let several young women leave their shelters in order to terminate their pregnancies. For months, ORR refused to reveal Lloyd’s justification for this ban on abortion access. But on Thursday, in response to a lawsuit, it published a redacted version of Lloyd’s memo explaining his decision to bar an undocumented teenager from getting an abortion, despite the fact that she likely conceived via sexual assault. The memo provides a vivid glimpse into how Lloyd imposes his anti-abortion ideology on minors under the pretext of protecting their “best interest.”
Lloyd began by acknowledging that the teenager requesting an abortion, known as Jane Poe, “is pregnant with the child of her attacker.” Shortly after being raped, Poe was apprehended attempting to cross into the United States illegally. She asked for an abortion but “rescinded the request” after her mother, as well as her probable sponsor, “threatened to ‘beat’ her if she did so.” A few days later, however, she asked again, and “has on at least one occasion threatened to harm herself if she does not obtain” the procedure. But, Lloyd added: “There is no indication that the pregnancy threatens her physical health in any way.”
When Lloyd wrote this memo, Poe was “nearly 22 weeks” pregnant.
“The child has at least a fighting chance at survival if born,” Lloyd noted—then described in graphic detail “the most likely method of abortion,” dilation and evacuation, which “even many abortionists find troublesome.” This procedure, Lloyd wrote, is “violence that has the ultimate destruction of another human being as its goal.”
An abortion, Lloyd asserted, “does not here cure the reality that she is the victim of an assault. … It is possible, and perhaps likely, that this young woman would go on to experience an abortion as an additional trauma on top of the trauma she experiences as a result of her sexual assault.” He elaborated:
Although formal research on this matter appears to be sparse, those who have worked with women who have experienced abortion have compiled a catalogue of anecdotal evidence, impossible to ignore, that shows that many women go on to experience it as a devastating trauma, even in the instance of rape. If the young woman was to go on to regret her abortion and experience it as a trauma, ORR will have had a hand in causing that trauma, and I am unwilling to put this young woman or ORR in that position.
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https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2017/12/trump-administration-bars-abortion-for-raped-minors-because-its-in-their-best-interest.html
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