A federal court ruled Friday that the government can’t stand in the way of underage illegal alien teens getting abortions while in federal custody.
The ruling is just the latest move in an ongoing saga between pro-abortion “rights” groups like the ACLU and the Trump administration, which has argued that the government’s assisting illegal alien teen girls in terminating their pregnancies while in federal custody violates taxpayers’ right not to have their money go toward facilitating abortion procedures.
Lawyers for the Department of Health and Human Services, which is responsible for sheltering children who illegally enter the country unaccompanied by a parent, have said the department has a policy of "refusing to facilitate" abortions. And the director of the office that oversees the shelters has said he believes teens in his agency's care have no constitutional right to abortion.
The government suggested that illegal aliens who want to have abortions be sent back home, where they're free to do whatever they want according to the laws of their own country.
The ACLU, on the other hand, has argued that by barring illegal alien teens from obtaining abortions, the government is violating their constitutional rights – despite the fact that they aren’t citizens or even legal residents of the country with said Constitution.
And apparently, at least one federal judge in Washington, D.C. agrees.
U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, an Obama appointee, said in the ruling Friday that Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement is "certainly entitled to maintain an interest in fetal life" and recommend that pregnant minors in their custody "choose one course over the other."
But despite admitting the existence of “fetal life,” Chutkan added that the government can’t mandate a policy that strips minors "of their right to make their own reproductive choices."
As for the government's suggestion of deporting women who want to have abortions back to their home countries, Chutkan declared that "This court will not sanction any policy or practice that forces vulnerable young women to make such a choice."
The government does have the option of appealing the order. HHS officials said in a statement that they will carefully review this ruling in conducting with the DOJ and decide how to proceed, saying the administration "strongly maintains that taxpayers are not responsible for facilitating the abortion of unaccompanied minors who entered the country illegally and are currently in the government's care."
The issue of illegal alien teens’ ability to obtain elective abortions while being held in federal custody cropped up last year in the case of Jane Doe, an unnamed illegal alien girl who wanted to get an abortion despite having entered the country illegally in September. On top of the immediate matter of saving Jane’s baby, pro-lifers were also worried that allowing her to get an abortion would set a precedent for women to come to the United States illegally to terminate their pregnancies, a procedure that’s still illegal or heavily regulated in most Central and South American nations.
While pro-abortion groups helped Jane Doe find private funding to actually have the abortion, the Trump administration argued that using taxpayer dollars to transport her to and from the abortion facility violated the legal separation between taxpayer dollars and abortion procedures.
Jane Doe ultimately got an abortion after a federal court ruled in her favor.