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Trump DH&HS official Scott Lloyd took a woman he slept with to get an abortion. Now...
The Trump Official Overseeing Migrant Girls’ Health Care Once Wrote He Couldn’t “Support Abortion for Any Reason”
When a woman Scott Lloyd slept with got pregnant, he took her to get an abortion. Now he’s on a crusade to stop migrants from having their own.
HANNAH LEVINTOVA AUG. 22, 2018 6:01 AM
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/08/scott-lloyd-essay-orr-pregnant-migrants-abortion/
Scott Lloyd’s anti-abortion crusade began when, as a young man, he found himself faced with a partner’s unexpected pregnancy. Many years later, Lloyd would take his battle to the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement, where, as its leader since March 2017, he has personally intervened to block teenage migrants in federal custody, including at least one rape victim, from accessing abortions. But it was that summer day long ago that made him decide abortion is wrong under all circumstances, including rape, incest, and when the life of the mother is at risk. When asked about his plans for the day, he said he was going fishing; instead, he drove the young woman he had gotten pregnant to get the abortion he disagreed with. Years later, as a first-year law student at Catholic University, he described this formative experience in anguished detail in a class assignment provided to Mother Jones by a classmate and confirmed by seven others.
“The truth about abortion,” he wrote, “is that my first child is dead, and no woman, man, Supreme Court, or government—NOBODY—has the right to tell me that she doesn’t belong here.”
Today, after a career spent harnessing the law to restrict abortion access, Lloyd oversees the lives of nearly 12,000 migrants under the age of 18, most of whom were detained after crossing the border without proper papers. As their legal guardian, the Office of Refugee Resettlement is charged with housing them in federally funded shelters and providing them with health care, including reproductive services. Under both the Bush and Obama administrations, ORR routinely permitted abortions sought by undocumented teens who obtained private funding for the procedure. But after President Donald Trump appointed Lloyd to lead the agency last spring, he quickly changed this longstanding policy, requiring any teenager in ORR’s custody seeking to terminate a pregnancy to get his direct approval.
His interventions forcing young women to extend or keep their pregnancies have sparked outrage among immigrant and abortion rights activists, as well as several major lawsuits claiming he is violating detainees’ constitutional protections. Lloyd has instructed ORR shelters to send pregnant young women to religiously affiliated crisis pregnancy centers that oppose abortion and to undergo medically unnecessary ultrasounds. In one case before Lloyd was formally ORR’s director, a shelter halted a medication abortion halfway through at the agency’s request while Lloyd conferred with colleagues about deploying a scientifically unproven method to, as Lloyd recounted in a deposition on the case, “reverse” the abortion to “save the life of the baby.” (After being taken to an emergency room at the direction of Lloyd and another staffer to check for a fetal heartbeat, the girl received her second dose.) In another, he ordered a pregnant girl otherwise ready for release be held until she received anti-abortion counseling. In yet another case, he denied a pregnant rape survivor who had threatened to hurt herself if forced to deliver, stymieing her quest for an abortion until a federal judge intervened. Lloyd personally travelled to see one young woman in ORR custody to try to dissuade her from having an abortion, and he delivered a similar message to another young woman by phone. In a 2017 deposition in an American Civil Liberties Union case challenging the new abortion policies he enacted at ORR, Lloyd acknowledged he has never approved an abortion request that crossed his desk.
When a woman Scott Lloyd slept with got pregnant, he took her to get an abortion. Now he’s on a crusade to stop migrants from having their own.
HANNAH LEVINTOVA AUG. 22, 2018 6:01 AM
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/08/scott-lloyd-essay-orr-pregnant-migrants-abortion/
Scott Lloyd’s anti-abortion crusade began when, as a young man, he found himself faced with a partner’s unexpected pregnancy. Many years later, Lloyd would take his battle to the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement, where, as its leader since March 2017, he has personally intervened to block teenage migrants in federal custody, including at least one rape victim, from accessing abortions. But it was that summer day long ago that made him decide abortion is wrong under all circumstances, including rape, incest, and when the life of the mother is at risk. When asked about his plans for the day, he said he was going fishing; instead, he drove the young woman he had gotten pregnant to get the abortion he disagreed with. Years later, as a first-year law student at Catholic University, he described this formative experience in anguished detail in a class assignment provided to Mother Jones by a classmate and confirmed by seven others.
“The truth about abortion,” he wrote, “is that my first child is dead, and no woman, man, Supreme Court, or government—NOBODY—has the right to tell me that she doesn’t belong here.”
Today, after a career spent harnessing the law to restrict abortion access, Lloyd oversees the lives of nearly 12,000 migrants under the age of 18, most of whom were detained after crossing the border without proper papers. As their legal guardian, the Office of Refugee Resettlement is charged with housing them in federally funded shelters and providing them with health care, including reproductive services. Under both the Bush and Obama administrations, ORR routinely permitted abortions sought by undocumented teens who obtained private funding for the procedure. But after President Donald Trump appointed Lloyd to lead the agency last spring, he quickly changed this longstanding policy, requiring any teenager in ORR’s custody seeking to terminate a pregnancy to get his direct approval.
His interventions forcing young women to extend or keep their pregnancies have sparked outrage among immigrant and abortion rights activists, as well as several major lawsuits claiming he is violating detainees’ constitutional protections. Lloyd has instructed ORR shelters to send pregnant young women to religiously affiliated crisis pregnancy centers that oppose abortion and to undergo medically unnecessary ultrasounds. In one case before Lloyd was formally ORR’s director, a shelter halted a medication abortion halfway through at the agency’s request while Lloyd conferred with colleagues about deploying a scientifically unproven method to, as Lloyd recounted in a deposition on the case, “reverse” the abortion to “save the life of the baby.” (After being taken to an emergency room at the direction of Lloyd and another staffer to check for a fetal heartbeat, the girl received her second dose.) In another, he ordered a pregnant girl otherwise ready for release be held until she received anti-abortion counseling. In yet another case, he denied a pregnant rape survivor who had threatened to hurt herself if forced to deliver, stymieing her quest for an abortion until a federal judge intervened. Lloyd personally travelled to see one young woman in ORR custody to try to dissuade her from having an abortion, and he delivered a similar message to another young woman by phone. In a 2017 deposition in an American Civil Liberties Union case challenging the new abortion policies he enacted at ORR, Lloyd acknowledged he has never approved an abortion request that crossed his desk.