According to court documents reviewed by Carter Sherman at Vice News, E. Scott Lloyd, the longtime forced-birther activist the Trump regime put in charge of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, discussed the possibility of “reversing” the medication abortion of an undocumented teenager from El Salvador being held in federal custody last March. The “reversal” is an unproven technique that some medical experts say, Sherman reports, “amounts to experimentation on women.”
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Medication abortions require the taking of two pills, mifepristone (brand name Mifeprex) and misoprostol (brand name Cytotec). After the first pill, the woman must take the second within 24-48 hours. Sources vary widely on the percentage of medication vs. surgical abortions in the United States, but they make up at least one-third and possibly one-half of all abortions now.
The teen, impregnated by rape, had already taken the first pill on March 3 and was in a Texas hospital ready to take the second. Texas is one of 19 states that require a physician to be present for the ingestion of both pills even though this is not required by standard medical practice.
Before she could take the second pill, ORR staff showed up, according to statements in a deposition Lloyd gave in December as part of a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union regarding the regime’s attempts to keep four undocumented teenagers from obtaining abortions last year. The staffdelayed the taking of the second pill for several hours during which, the documents state, the “health status” of the “unborn child” was checked out. An examination detected a fetal heartbeat, and the possibility of reversing the abortion with a dose of the hormone progesterone was discussed.
Ultimately, no progesterone was administered, and the teenager was allowed to take the second pill.
The reversal procedure is the brainchild of Dr. George Delgado of one of those lying crisis pregnancy centers, Culture of Life Family Services in San Diego. As noted here last June:
Delgado says the procedure can be stopped and the abortion “reversed” if a woman decides after taking mifepristone that she’s changed her mind and wants to carry her pregnancy to term. Not taking the misoprostol and getting injections of the hormone progesterone can accomplish that, says Delgado, who began undertaking the technique with another doctor in 2007, developed a protocol for it in 2009, and claims some 300 women have ended their abortions as a result. He also co-founded the Abortion Pill Reversal group, which, despite its deeply anti-choice foundation, ironically argues that women should have a choice to end an abortion already underway.
The claims about the reversals have not been documented. Sherman again:
Nevertheless, Lloyd said in the deposition that he and his staff discussed the possibility of abortion reversal. Emails obtained by VICE News, including one sent last March to the clinic handling the abortion of a teenager in ORR’s custody, also mention progesterone explicitly and show that officials had questions about the feasibility of using it “for the purpose of aborting a chemical abortion process.”
The move by Lloyd is what can be expected by such zealots once somebody gives them authority to put their goals into practice. In a Washington Post story about Lloyd’s efforts to stop undocumented teens from obtaining abortions, Rachel Siegel reported in October:
As a law student, he worked closely with the parents of Terri Schiavo, who fought to keep their daughter alive through feeding tubes in one of the country’s highest-profile right-to-die cases, according to the Los Angeles Times.
Lloyd later worked in private practice at LegalWorks Apostolate, which provides legal representation and counsel “while remaining faithful to Church teaching.”
During this time, he wrote an essay for Ethika Politika, an online journal affiliated with the Center for Morality in Public Life, arguing that “contraceptives are the cause of abortion” while attacking Planned Parenthood and “other population control entities” for spreading misinformation.
No surprise that he would suggest an unverified technique to interfere with a young woman’s reproductive rights. No doubt he’d stop her (and all the rest of us) from using contraceptives if he could.