Scott Lloyd, the anti-abortion zealot currently leading the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement—and a man so incompetent that he was effectively removed from his position this summer—is writing a book about abortion. Guess we now know what he’s been doing with all of his free time!
Thanks to an essay he wrote in 2004 while a law student at Catholic University, we have an inkling of what the book might read like. In it, he shared how his own experience as a young man, when he says he got a woman pregnant, shaped his views that no one, particularly teens in government custody, should be able to have an abortion. That woman ended up getting an abortion, and the Scott Lloyd we know today was thus born.
“If a woman needs to defend so fiercely the ‘one thing they can call their own—their body,’ then they shouldn’t be so careless with it as to have sex when they are not ready to be pregnant,” he wrote in the essay from 2004.
What else did Lloyd have to say in this essay?
The Holocaust was the violent result of society assigning lesser value to a vulnerable segment of its population. Abortion is the same exact thing. One can argue that we need to protect women, or they should be allowed to do what they want for their bodies. What prevents you from saying that German society needed protection and Germany was allowed to do what they wanted with their society?
The Jews who died in the Holocaust had a chance to laugh, play, sing, dance, learn, and love each other. The victims of abortion do not, simply because people have decided this is the way it should be, not through any proper discernment of their humanity. Neither type of murder is more or less tragic, but don’t fool yourself into thinking that they are not both tragedies, and they are not both murder.
Ah, yes. That.
Meanwhile, Lloyd is still under review for his treatment of the migrant children who were in ORR’s care after being separated from their families, and his planned anti-abortion screed has apparently, as Politico put it, “added a further wrinkle” to that process. As Politico notes, “Government employees typically are discouraged from writing books about subjects that overlap with their official responsibilities, and HHS lawyers have been involved in the matter.”
Department of Health and Human Services officials have said in the past that Lloyd’s personal beliefs on abortion have had no bearing on decisions he’s made as ORR director—decisions that have included personally intervening when a minor in ORR custody seeks to get an abortion.
We look forward to reading Lloyd’s forthcoming book on his personal beliefs which have in no way shaped his crusade to prevent every teenager in ORR care from getting an abortion.