Appeals Court Rebukes Brett Kavanaugh, Grants Abortion Access to Undocumented Minors.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s old court rebuked his anti-abortion jurisprudence on Friday, compelling the Trump administration to allow undocumented minors in federal custody to terminate their pregnancies. The appeals court’s ruling rejects the administration’s blanket ban on abortion access for these minors as a violation of their constitutional right to choose. It should guarantee all undocumented minors control over their bodies, a right the federal government has spent more than two years seeking to revoke.
Friday’s decision is the latest chapter in a controversy that began in March 2017. That month, then–Director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement Scott Lloyd announced that minors in federal custody could not obtain abortions without his permission, which he flatly refused to grant. Instead, Lloyd urged pregnant minors not to get abortions and called their parents—without their consent—to inform them that their children were pregnant. He also tracked minors’ periods and pregnancies on a spreadsheet, apparently to determine when they were too far along to obtain a legal abortion. Lloyd even barred abortions for minors whose pregnancies resulted from rape, declaring that forcing these teenagers to give birth was in their “best interest.”
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