The Most Vile Law School Essay You'll Ever Read
This essay compares abortion to the Holocaust -- and concludes freedom of choice is worse.
Scott Lloyd, director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
You may not know Scott Lloyd’s name but as head of the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement, he has a lot of authority over minor migrants in federal custody. And he has used that power to wage his own personal war against reproductive freedom, a battle that began after he paid for his former girlfriend to have an abortion. Now a vocal anti-choice advocate, he has personally intervened to stop migrants in federal custody — including at least one rape victim — from accessing a choice protected (at least for now) by the Constitution, a choice he himself made as a young man.
The Office of Refugee Resettlement acts as the legal guardian to underaged migrants in federal custody. In his role, Lloyd has radically shifted the policy under both George W. Bush and Barack Obama to allow teenagers in cusotdy to receive abortions provided they had private funding for the procedure. Now, Lloyd demands direct approval before any person under his authority is able to access an abortion, and according to a 2017 deposition, Lloyd has never approved such a request. In a chilling expose on Lloyd, Mother Jones documents the way Lloyd has handled such requests:
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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.
According to the Mother Jones report, Lloyd’s disturbing mission against a woman’s reproductive choice was obvious as far back as law school. In 2004, as a 1L at Catholic University in a section of a class called Catholic Social Teaching taught by Ken Pennington, Lloyd unleashed a 6-page essay — referred to by some classmates as a “manifesto” — detailing his opposition to reproductive choice. The essay quickly spread around the law school community, and one former student still has a copy and provided it to Mother Jones.
In the essay, Lloyd says that though he helped finance his former girlfriend’s abortion he really wanted her to carry the fetus to term and then have the baby adopted. When she refused, Lloyd gave his girlfriend money for the procedure. He wrote of that experience:
I’ve realized that absolutely every single reason to support an abortion is a distortion of the truth. Two steps beyond all of them is a proper investigation of the matter, and two steps back reveals the fear and selfishness behind them.
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Lloyd also posits that women shouldn’t have sex unless they are willing to carry a pregnancy to term, saying, “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.” So a woman’s body is only an incubator for a baby, not her own to do with as she pleases? Got it. This would be a laughably ignorant position if Lloyd wasn’t now in a position to enforce his beliefs on the bodies of girls entrusted to his care.
His screed goes on to argue that the rights of the fetus and the father are impinged upon when a woman chooses to terminate a pregnancy:
By making the choice to have sex, a woman is making a conscious decision to engage in an act that has the natural result of creating a pregnancy. A pregnancy implicates the rights of two other people—the baby, and the father, whether our government wants to recognize that or not. A state would not be violating any rights by recognizing and codifying the natural consequence of a person’s action, protecting a fetus’s right to life, and protecting a father’s right to be a father.
I’ll also note right here that he opposes abortion in cases of rape and incest.
There is still a lot in this essay to get angry over, especially as he describes abortion as “directly opposed to femininity” and makes a lot of assumptions about who is getting abortions:
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Roe v. Wade points to the mental and financial troubles a pregnant woman faces. It doesn’t speak highly of women to assume that they can’t handle the pressures of being a mother, and that they need a procedure that is so directly opposed to femininity. Ask any of the female deans or professors at our school how much abortion was a factor in their success as a female professional. Ask them if having a child spelled mental and financial ruin. I sort of doubt that abortion was a key step on their path to success. Is abortion a choice we should endorse in an effort to make women a more successful segment of society?
And how exactly does he think he knows what medical procedures the women at his — or any — law school have had? Because he goes to Catholic University? That argument doesn’t really hold up.
As repugnant as Lloyd’s essay has been thus far, buckle up — it’s about to get a whole lot worse. He goes on to compare abortion to the Holocaust — and concludes freedom of choice is worse. Here’s the passage in question in all its stomach-churning horror:
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.
There are two cases filed by the ACLU that argue that LLoyd, in denying reproductive choice to those in his care, has violated the the separation of church and state. But Lloyd denies that his decision is influenced by his personal beliefs in abortion…. Well, let’s go back to Lloyd’s manifesto on the subject, shall we?
In his law school essay, Lloyd grounds his opposition to abortion in Christianity, describing abortion as a sin in the context of his Catholic faith. “What of Christ’s body did he hold back? He had a choice not to die for our sins,” Lloyd wrote. “The martyrs that built our church sacrificed their bodies to the most violent, tortuous treatment. All our Church requires is that a woman has the child growing inside of her, and you’re willing to turn your back on the Church for that?”
It seems pretty clear that Lloyd’s retrograde opinions about abortion are linked directly to his religious beliefs — beliefs that are now being foisted on minor migrant girls in his custody.
Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, and host of The Jabot podcast. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter (@Kathryn1).
