At last, a major development in one of the more obscene legal battles of the past year: On Friday, the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ordered the Trump administration to stop violating pregnant unaccompanied minors’ reproductive rights until the legal challenge to the policy has been resolved.
On Friday, a federal judge in Washington, D.C., said the Trump administration cannot prevent young, undocumented women in federal custody from seeking abortions.
That includes interfering with or blocking medical appointments, abortion counseling, and abortion services.
It protects minors without guardians, who come under the control of Department of Health and Human Services Office of Refugee Resettlement, from being forced to share if they are pregnant and whether they are considering having an abortion. It also protects contractors that provide shelter to those who have sought pregnancy, abortion, and abortion-related medical care.
The legal controversy began in October, when the ACLU had to go to court to force federal officials to stop blocking a 17-year-old Central American woman detained in Texas from getting an abortion.
To be clear, officials weren’t just refusing to facilitate access to care, they were intervening to bully her out of exercising her rights—from the top down.
[Director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement E. Scott] Lloyd has personally intervened to try to persuade unaccompanied minor girls not to have abortions, according to an HHS official.
“When there’s a child in the program who is pregnant, he has been reaching out to her and trying to help as much as possible with life-affirming options,” the spokesman said. “He by law has custody of these children, and just like a foster parent, he knows that that’s a lot of responsibility and he is going to make choices that he thinks are best for both the mother and the child.”
In February, we discovered that Lloyd & co. wanted to go so far as forcibly attempting to ‘reverse’ medical abortions.
[N]ews emerged, via a Trump official’s deposition and the disclosure of a series of emails, that the Department of Health and Human Services subjected an unaccompanied minor to at least one unnecessary medical test and came perilously close to subjecting her to medical experimentation.
The Office of Refugee Resettlement has blocked four unaccompanied minor immigrants from obtaining abortions, capitulating only after the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) secured a court order to ensure access. During a deposition in this ongoing case, director of refugee resettlement E. Scott Lloyd admitted to something potentially even more troubling than denying care: He and his staff explored the possibility of “reversing” or “aborting a chemical abortion process.”
Medical abortion occurs in two stages: First, the patient takes mifepristone under a doctor’s supervision; they then take a second medication, misoprostol, at home—or in detention, in the “Jane Doe” cases at hand. Proponents of “reversing abortion” encourage women who have already taken the first medication to take progesterone instead of the second pill. There’s no proven way to “reverse” an abortion, and the safest means of lowering the odds that the medical abortion will be successful is skipping the second medication.
While shy of a victory, Friday’s ruling is significant.
By issuing a preliminary injunction against Trump to keep officials from implementing the policy until there’s a final ruling, the judge has signaled that the ACLU has a strong case for ending the policy altogether.