Trump Official Blocked Immigrant Teen Rape Victims Abortion Because He Personally Opposed It

[Judi Lynn]

12/21/2017 06:00 pm ET
Trump Official Blocked Immigrant Teen Rape Victim’s Abortion Because He Personally Opposed It
ORR director Scott Lloyd wrote that rape does not justify “violence against an innocent human life.”
By Elise Foley and Laura Bassett

A Trump administration official blocked a detained immigrant teenager from leaving a shelter to receive an abortion even though she had been raped, arguing it would be curing “violence with further violence,” according to documents unsealed as part of a lawsuit on Thursday.

Office of Refugee Resettlement Director Scott Lloyd, who has taken the unprecedented step of requiring a sign-off for any abortion of an immigrant teen in custody, wrote in an internal Dec. 17 memo that the 17-year-old girl had been raped in her home country, that the rape had resulted in pregnancy, and that she had threatened to harm herself if she was unable to have an abortion. He also wrote that she was 22 weeks pregnant at the time.

″[W]e are being asked to participate in killing a human being in our care,” he wrote. “I cannot direct the program to proceed in this manner. We cannot be a place of refuge while we are at the same time a place of violence. We have to choose, and we ought to choose protect life rather than to destroy it.”

The document was the first to reveal that Lloyd has barred victims of rape from obtaining abortions, as he has done with other teens in government custody, and one of the clearest descriptions yet of how his ideology is shaping the agency’s treatment of pregnant girls. The government previously refused to tell HuffPost whether it was barring rape victims from obtaining abortions.

More:
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/scott-lloyd-blocked-abortion-memo_us_5a3c1f45e4b06d1621b30381?section=us_politics

[Ilsa]

1. She was able to get the abortion after a court ruled in her favor.

She got it asap before a higher court could block it.

And that turd has it backwards:

Lloyd wrote in the memo that he was ”mindful that abortion is offered by some as a solution to a rape,” but did not see it that way and believed it was “perhaps likely” that allowing the teenager to receive an abortion would create “additional trauma on top of the trauma she experiences as a result of her sexual assault.” 

Giving birth to a rapist's child is more likely to cause trauma.

[procon]

2. Forced pregnancy is a nightmare sentence for young women.

Its made worse when a self important government official imposes his personal belief in the power of male patriarchal, authoritarian dominance that makes woman submissive to his religious fanaticism over her rights under existing law.

[monmouth4]

3. And yet abortion was suggested to Marla when she announced her pregnancy

of Tiffany. Strange times.