Abortion activists often claim that no one is pro-abortion. But they vilify anyone who tries to give vulnerable pregnant women and girls access to life-affirming choices.
That is what is happening right now with the Office of Refugee Resettlement under Trump-appointee Scott Lloyd.
Earlier this year, Lloyd, who is pro-life, issued a new policy requiring that taxpayer-funded shelters for immigrants and refugees offer life-affirming support to girls who are pregnant. The duties of the office including providing basic care, including health care, to unaccompanied immigrant children until they are placed with a family member or sponsor.
Lloyd said the shelters may not take “any action that facilitates” an abortion for unaccompanied minors without his direct approval, and that “grantees should not be supporting abortion services … only pregnancy services and life-affirming options counseling.”
This move should be applauded. Instead, it angered abortion activists, including the ACLU. In a biased piece in Reveal News, the pro-abortion legal group blasted Lloyd and President Donald Trump for encouraging shelters to provide counseling from non-profit pro-life pregnancy centers, rather than abortion businesses.
ACLU attorney Brigitte Amiri said her legal group received a document called “Trusted Providers in HHS Cities” that instructs the shelters to direct pregnant moms to pro-life pregnancy centers for information and assistance.
“It came from an advocate on the ground, and I’m not at liberty to say whom it came from,” Amiri said of the document. “But it’s my understanding that it’s a list of approved HHS sites that any minor who requests an abortion must visit to get so-called counseling from the crisis pregnancy center.”
Amiri said they linked the document to the pro-life pregnancy help group Heartbeat International.
Here’s more from the biased report:
According to Amiri, the Office of Refugee Resettlement sent the list to the shelters across the country, giving local staff a set of approved options.
The resettlement office didn’t respond to questions from Reveal about the list, but in court filings, the government has never disputed its authenticity.
To learn how the government made the list, and how much it had been used, Reveal called each of the 60 providers on the list, reaching representatives for 24 of them. None were aware of the list, or that the government had approved them to provide pregnancy counseling to migrant minors.
“Normally people come in on their own,” said Cindi Ritter, executive director of Baltimore’s Pregnancy Center North. “We don’t have agencies call us.” …
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The list includes providers in 22 cities near refugee resettlement facilities, including Los Angeles, Phoenix and New York City. All offer so-called pro-life counseling and have ties to local anti-abortion networks. Many are religious, provide counseling for post-abortion trauma or “abortion reversal” – a potentially dangerous treatment, based on dubious science, in which women are given a large dose of hormones to supposedly counteract the effects of the abortion pill mifepristone.
The new life-affirming policies of the Trump administration came to a head earlier this fall when the ACLU pushed the office to help facilitate an abortion for an unaccompanied minor in Texas. “Jane Doe,” the undocumented teenager at the center of the court battle, aborted her 16-week unborn baby on Oct. 25, barely a day after a federal appeals court forced Trump administration officials to help facilitate the abortion.
Later, the Trump administration said the ACLU lied to its lawyers about when the teen’s abortion would take place, the AP reports. News reports indicate the teen needed mental health counseling after aborting her unborn child.
The Trump administration is trying to protect both mother and child by encouraging parenting and adoption, rather than abortion. And pregnancy resource centers provide the much-needed support that young, vulnerable and often frightened young mothers need to realize that they can parent or make an adoption plan.
Most women do not want abortions, but many feel it is their only option. Often, the encouragement and support that pregnancy resource centers provide are just what pregnant moms are longing for most. The government should be applauded, not criticized, for encouraging life-affirming options for the teen moms and unborn babies who cross our borders.
