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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsScott Lloyd regrets his partner having an abortion, so he blocks every migrant from having one
Link to tweet
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/08/scott-lloyd-essay-orr-pregnant-migrants-abortion/
Scott Lloyds anti-abortion crusade began when, as a young man, he found himself faced with a partners 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 after rape or incest or 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 governmentNOBODYhas the right to tell me that she doesnt 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 long-standing policy, requiring any teenager in ORRs custody seeking to terminate a pregnancy to get his direct approval.
Scott Lloyd has tremendously crossed a line.
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 ORRs director, a shelter halted a medication abortion halfway through at the agencys 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 that 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 traveled 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.
Everyone has the right to feel about abortion however they feel, says Brigitte Amiri, deputy director of the ACLUs Reproductive Freedom project and one of the lawyers suing Lloyd. But where Scott Lloyd has tremendously crossed a line is by using those personal beliefs and developing a policy for all unaccompanied immigrant minors.
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Lloyd argued that women who arent willing or able to give birth should abstain from sex: If a woman needs to defend so fiercely the one thing they can call their owntheir body, then they shouldnt be so careless with it as to have sex when they are not ready to be pregnant. And he attacked Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision legalizing abortion in America, homing in on its discussion of the potential negative consequences to unwanted pregnancies.
dchill
(38,502 posts)Iggo
(47,558 posts)Still, you don't see me going around forcing women to have abortions, do you!
Caliman73
(11,738 posts)Instead of working out his guilt for getting a woman pregnant by his own irresponsible actions and then adopting a more understanding position on the decisions each of us face, this guy distorts reality, lets his personal feelings override all logic, and turns religious nut and dictator.
A good therapist could have averted all this crap, but mental health services are stigmatized throughout his country.
Delmette2.0
(4,166 posts)Guy Whitey Corngood
(26,501 posts)lostnfound
(16,180 posts)To atone for his sin, he should volunteer to pay child support for some poor woman whod like to keep her baby but cant afford it.
Or, he could donate to an organization that provides free contraception.
Or, he could counsel young men to postpone sex until marriage.
Demovictory9
(32,457 posts)Lloyd argued that women who arent willing or able to give birth should abstain from sex: If a woman needs to defend so fiercely the one thing they can call their owntheir body, then they shouldnt be so careless with it as to have sex when they are not ready to be pregnant. And he attacked Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision legalizing abortion in America, homing in on its discussion of the potential negative consequences to unwanted pregnancies.
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in his mind, the pregnancy was his partner's fault. His job is to block women from having abortions.
Iggo
(47,558 posts)Separation
(1,975 posts)Sometimes I feel like I'm taking crazy pills. We have an absolute dunce in charge of education, a guy who probably throws his oil down the drain after changing it from his car in charge of the EPA (who am I kidding, he has never had to change his own oil), a half man half imp who is probably still suffering from a bad trip in charge of Justice, and a reality star burnout as president!
I have my theories how this happened.
TheBlackAdder
(28,205 posts).
She had your ass pegged.
.
Demonaut
(8,918 posts)Ilsa
(61,695 posts)Somehow, making the fetus female is supposed to make us feel more protective of it.
3catwoman3
(24,006 posts)So should men who aren't ready to be fathers!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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He bears no responsibility for this unintended pregnancy?
If you'd kept your dick in your drawers, you dumbass, you wouldn't have had anything to regret. And no extrapolating your personal experience onto anyone else. Mind your own damn business.