As of this April, the U.S. courts have stopped forced-birthers—like Trump’s Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) director Scott Lloyd—from being the arbiters of women’s bodies. Lloyd, who is supposed to be helping refugees find a safe place to live within the United States, seems to have spent most of his life (and now his time in the ORR) crusading against abortions. And in Lloyd’s defense, he’s the perfect male chauvinist hypocrite to do such a thing. As Mother Jones reports, during his law school days back in 2004, Lloyd was on a list-serv, sharing papers with his fellow Catholic Social Teaching classmates. He wrote a six-page essay about how, when he was younger, he took a young woman he’d gotten pregnant to get an abortion, paid for half of it, and lied to others about what he was doing. His regrets led him to his life’s crusade against women who are “so careless with it as to have sex when they are not ready to be pregnant.”
Surprisingly Lloyd’s carelessly unprotected penis was clearly not at fault here. But, hey, let’s blame “careless” women and their wily ways. Lloyd argued that he felt terrible about the whole situation, and described the events of the abortion as such:
On the way there, I gave her the money, mostly in ones, for two reasons: 1) if I didn’t, I would be the enemy and she would stop listening to me and 2) because if she went through with it, I didn’t want to leave thinking it wasn’t my fault. Both were stupid reasons. In the parking lot we argued one last time.
As one of the students in that class told Mother Jones, “if you’re truly pro-life, you don’t pay for anyone’s abortion, because you don’t see yourself as being a bad guy for not paying.” But this is Scott Lloyd who, while arguing women who are “careless” and let men have sex with them (including women that are raped and didn’t “let” anybody have sex with them) should be forced to birth children, also argues that “contraceptives are the cause of abortion.” His logic has some very convenient elasticity, when he wants it to.
Other students had a hard time finishing the essay when Lloyd veered into equating the Holocaust of Jews during World War II with abortion.
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.
So, while Lloyd tells Democrats and women that he isn’t applying his personal feelings and thoughts to his job as head of the ORR, his actions have seemed to run in line with the narcissistic demands of a teenage boy who can’t get his girlfriend to do what he wants.