ABORTION/IMMIGRATION/LEGAL: “The 17-year-old migrant was pregnant. She said she had been raped in her home county, and she knew from the timing that she was carrying her attacker’s child.
She wanted to terminate her pregnancy. But she was underage and undocumented, and, after she was caught crossing the border illegally, living in a government shelter.
The Trump administration official in charge of her care decided not to grant her access to an abortion — because, he said, abortion was itself a form of ‘violence.’
A woman’s desire to end a pregnancy springing from rape might be ‘understandable,’ wrote Scott Lloyd, the director of the federal agency that oversees the shelter, in his denial memo on Sunday. But, he wrote, it was not possible to ‘cure violence with further violence.’…
It took a lawsuit, a federal court order and an unexpected reversal this week for Jane Poe, as the teenager is known in court papers, to secure access to an abortion. Yet Mr. Lloyd’s memo, released by government lawyers in court on Thursday, spells out a fervently uncompromising opposition to abortion that all but guarantees further clashes at the charged intersection of abortion and immigration…
The director has personally gone to meet with pregnant teenagers in immigration custody to persuade them not to have abortions, drawing accusations from abortion rights advocates that he is forcing his beliefs onto the young women.”
-Vivan Yee, “A Teenager Said She Had Been Raped in Her Home Country. The U.S. Opposed Her Abortion.,” The New York Times online, Dec. 22, 2017