Scott Lloyd's Law School Essay on Abortion Was So Extreme That a Classmate Kept a Copy for 14 Years

By Esther Wang | August 22, 2018 | 3:16pm

News Politics

Scott Lloyd, the anti-abortion zealot who is the head of the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement, has made it his personal mission to stop every migrant teen under his custody, including rape victims, from getting abortions—going so far as to personally intervene when an unaccompanied minor under ORR care seeks an abortion. Lloyd has stated before that abortion is equal to “killing a human being,” once wrote that “contraceptives are the cause of abortion” (a real head scratcher), and is currently the subject of two separate lawsuits filed by the American Civil Liberties Union challenging ORR’s draconian new restrictions on migrant teens who wish to terminate their pregnancies.

Now, in a report from Mother Jones, we find out that Lloyd says his anti-abortion stance stems in part—why am I not surprised—from his own experience as a young man, when he says he got a woman pregnant. (She wanted an abortion, he wanted her to give birth and then put the infant up for adoption; they argued, he ended up paying for half of the procedure, and thus an anti-abortion crusader was born.)

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We know this in part because, while a first-year law student at Catholic University in 2004, he wrote a six-page essay—an essay that so horrified some of his fellow classmates that one of them has kept a copy of it for more than a decade—detailing his thoughts on abortion, which reads like a Greatest Hits album of every anti-abortion argument ever made.

His former classmate provided a copy of Lloyd’s essay to Mother Jones, and here are some choice excerpts:

“The truth about abortion,” he wrote, “is that my first child is dead, and no woman, man, Supreme Court, or government—NOBODY—has the right to tell me that she doesn’t belong here.”

Lloyd argued that women shouldn’t have sex if they’re not prepared to give birth:

“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.”

…

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.

He then painted abortion as an act that is “directly opposed to femininity”:

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?

It somehow gets worse, as he compared abortion to genocide and the Holocaust:

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.

He had a bright future ahead of him, turns out.