A 10-year-old rape victim in Ohio was denied an abortion, sparking outrage online as many Republican-led states strip away reproductive rights following the Supreme Court's overruling of Roe v. Wade.
Sheena
@MomSheenanigans
GOP: Maybe she should use protection if she didn't want to get pregnant.
D: she was raped
GOP: *switches talk track* what was she wearing?
D: she's 10.
GOP: *checks notes* this is a blessing from God
MONSTERS
Gavi Begtrup
@GaviBegtrup
A 10-year-old girl is raped. The State forces her to remain pregnant and tells her to consider it an “opportunity.”
This isn’t Iran. This isn’t Gilead. This isn’t hypothetical.
This happened today in Ohio.
(Andrew Stanton. “'She's 10': Child Rape Victim's Abortion Denial Sparks Outrage on Twitter.” Newsweek. July 02, 2022.)
Ohio has outlawed abortion just weeks after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. And, meanwhile, physicians in neighboring Indiana described an influx of out-of-state patients seeking care. Among them: a pregnant 10-year-old.
Dr. Caitlin Bernard, an Indianapolis obstetrician-gynecologist, told the Indianapolis Star that just three days after the federal right to an abortion was reversed she received a call from a colleague, a child abuse doctor in Ohio, who needed her help.
The physician had a pregnant patient – a 10-year-old who got pregnant after getting raped – who could no longer legally undergo the procedure in her home state. The girl was six weeks and three days pregnant when Dr. Bernard was contacted, the Indianapolis Star, reported.
Could Bernard help?
Indiana lawmakers are poised to further restrict or ban abortion in mere weeks. The Indiana General Assembly will convene in a special session July 25 when it will discuss restrictions to abortion policy along with inflation relief.
But for now, the procedure is still is legal here. And so the girl soon was on her way to Indiana to Bernard's care.
(Shari Rudavsky and Rachel Fradette. “As Ohio restricts abortions, 10-year-old girl travels to Indiana for procedure.” Indianapolis Star. July 01, 2022.)
Since Friday, the abortion clinics where Dr. Katie McHugh, an independent obstetrician-gynecologists works have seen “an insane amount of requests” from pregnant people in Kentucky and Ohio, where it is far more difficult to get an abortion.
For now, Indiana abortion providers have been fielding more calls from neighboring states. Typically about five to eight patients a day might hail from out of state, said McHugh, who works at multiple clinics in central and southern Indiana. Now, the clinics are seeing about 20 such patients a day.
Kentucky patients have been coming to Indiana in higher numbers since earlier this spring when more restrictive laws took effect there, McHugh said.
A similar dynamic is at play at Women’s Med, a medical center that performs abortions in Indianapolis that has a sister center in Dayton, Ohio. In the past week, they have doubled the number of patients they treat for a complete procedure, accepting many referrals from their Ohio counterpart.
More than 100 patients in Dayton had to be scheduled at the Indianapolis facility, a representative for Women’s Med, wrote in an email to IndyStar.
Women and pregnant people are “crying, distraught, desperate, thankful and appreciative,” the representative wrote.
(Shari Rudavsky and Rachel Fradette. “As Ohio restricts abortions, 10-year-old girl travels to Indiana for procedure.” Indianapolis Star. July 01, 2022.)
Other nearby states, including Illinois, where abortion is likely to remain legal, are bracing for an influx of patients seeking care from nearby states where the procedure is more heavily restricted, including Ohio, Kentucky, and Missouri.
Planned Parenthood Illinois expects the state will see an additional 20,000 to 30,000 patients overall crossing its border to receive abortions each year.
Conclusion
For decades, about 75 percent of Americans have consistently told pollsters that abortion should be legal in cases of rape and incest. But many of the measures now set to take effect do away with such exceptions.
(Gallup's May 1-10 Values and Beliefs poll (2018), are similar to the prior update, in 2012, as well as to Gallup's first measure of this question, in 1996.)
Elaine Godfrey, staff writer at The Atlantic, wrote …
“President Ronald Reagan detested abortion but endorsed exceptions for rape in the 1980s; George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump all also indicated their support for the measures. The National Right to Life Committee supported legislation that included exceptions in the 1990s. Even the Hyde Amendment, the federal law that prohibits federal funds from being used to pay for abortions, has long contained these exceptions.
“In the past few years, though, the anti-abortion movement has moved in a different direction. In 2019, Alabama legislators passed an abortion ban that lacked rape and incest exceptions. Nine other states—Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Ohio, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Texas—have passed similar laws.
“But Republicans have plowed ahead anyway, confident that they’re on the right side of this issue not only morally, but politically. Maybe a lack of exceptions for rape is not the poison pill it once was. 'We’ve seen state legislatures adopt restriction after restriction and ban after ban, and these legislators remain in power,' Elizabeth Nash, a policy analyst at the Guttmacher Institute, which supports abortion rights, told me. 'It doesn’t feel like there are any consequences for them.'”
(Elaine Godfrey. “The GOP’s Strange Turn Against Rape Exceptions.” The Atlantic. May 04, 2022.)
Republicans have increased their opposition despite the fact that obtaining an abortion under a rape or incest exception is difficult. Many states require rape survivors to file a police report to qualify. “These exceptions don’t do the job that people think they’re going to do,” Nash said. But the trend toward blanket abortion bans signals a clear shift in the anti-abortion movement.
Banning all abortions, even in cases of rape and incest, is ideologically consistent, the bans’ proponents argue: If abortion is murder, why would murder be acceptable in any instance? “We don’t issue birth certificates in the United States with a ratings system based on how someone was conceived,” said Kristi Hamrick, a spokesperson for the anti-abortion group Students for Life. “Clearly crimes must be fully prosecuted, and women [must be] helped. But we mourn as well for the preborn, who also suffer.”
Godfrey concludes …
“The anti-abortion-rights movement still seeks to portray itself as advocating for pregnant women, rather than seeking to punish them, and leaps into damage-control mode if its allies suggest otherwise.
“During his primary campaign in 2016, for example, Donald Trump suggested in a town-hall interview with MSNBC’s Chris Matthews that women should face 'some sort of punishment' for obtaining an abortion.
“Republicans and leaders of the anti-abortion movement pushed back immediately. 'No pro-lifer would ever want to punish a woman who has chosen abortion,' said Jeanne Mancini, the president of the March for Life Education and Defense Fund. 'We invite a woman who has gone down this route to consider paths to healing, not punishment.'”
(Elaine Godfrey. “The GOP’s Strange Turn Against Rape Exceptions.” The Atlantic. May 04, 2022.)
Trump, realizing that he had entered politically iffy territory, retracted his statement. Abortion bans seek to punish providers, rather than people who seek out the procedure. But this political third rail may be losing its charge too. Several women have recently been arrested and jailed in cases involving self-induced abortions. “If abortion is murder, then women are hiring the hitmen,” Carol Sanger, a professor at Columbia Law School who studies reproductive rights, told me. “It’s not logically impossible to get to that position.”
With Roe v. Wade being overturned, women … girls … who travel to other states to get an abortion are protected … I guess, for now.
“Under bedrock constitutional principles, women who reside in states that have banned access to comprehensive reproductive care must remain free to seek that care in states where it is legal,” U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a recent statement.
Middlebury College economics professor Caitlin Myers looked into the data on access to abortion facilities around the country, and predicted in May that about 24 percent of women who’d like an abortion would be unable to reach a provider in the affected states, under the new laws, and that three-quarters of those women would give birth in the first year after a Roe reversal. Myers’s analysis assumes one-fourth of abortion seekers who can’t get out of their state might be able to get the procedure through other means.
Assuming that the number of people seeking abortions in the affected states in the next year is the same as those who got abortions in 2019 (the most recent year for which we have data), about two in 10 women hoping to stop their pregnancy would have to give birth in the next 12 months.
I believe no 10-year-old child should be forced to have children. The stance of those who support abortion bans is echoed by people like South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem, who was challenged Sunday about her stance on exempting rape victims from her state's abortion ban after this Ohio girl was raped, and was then denied an abortion.
CNN's State of The Union host Dana Bash asked Noem: "Will the state of South Dakota going forward force a 10-year-old in that very same situation to have a baby?" Noem generally skirted the answer after calling the pregnancy a “tragedy.”
The governor made a similar remark a week earlier when CBS' Face the Nation host Margaret Brennan asked her whether or not she is open to exceptions for rape and incest when it comes to abortion.
"I just have never believed that having a tragedy or tragic situation happen to someone is a reason to have another tragedy occur," Noem responded. "I believe every life is precious.”
“Another tragedy occur”? How about the fragile life of the 10-year-old victim now forced to deal with the aftermath of an unspeakable, heinous crime? Ohio gave the family no choice to end the product of the act. The heartbeat law assumed a viable human being was alive at six weeks.
The Ohio GOP doesn't even use science to reinforce their position. Although some people might picture a heart-shaped organ beating inside a fetus, this is not the case.
At 6 weeks, an embryo does not have a fully formed heart. Rather, it has a cluster of cells (that eventually forms into a heart) that emits electrical signals, which can be detected on an ultrasound. This flutter happens because the group of cells that will become the future "pacemaker" of the heart gain the capacity to fire electrical signals.
But the heart is far from fully formed at this stage, and the "beat" isn't audible; if doctors put a stethoscope up to a woman's belly this early on in her pregnancy, they would not hear a heartbeat. (What's more, it isn't until the eighth week of pregnancy that the baby is called a fetus; prior to that, it's still considered an embryo, according to the Cleveland Clinic.)
The heart of a fetus is fully developed by the 10th week
(Kloesel B, DiNardo JA, Body SC. “Cardiac Embryology and Molecular Mechanisms of Congenital Heart Disease: A Primer for Anesthesiologists.” Anesth Analg. 2016 September; 123(3):551-69.)
Denying choice in instances of pregnancy such as this is draconian. The intrusion of this so-called “morality” is certain to wreck lives and force terrible negative medical effects. What do these lawmakers want by enacting such legislation – a right to life or an open invitation to child abuse? It makes me wonder if these “no exception anti-abortionists” have a heartbeat themselves – a vital pulsation to animate their desire to protect the living … in this case, an elementary student they deemed capable of motherhood.
They say it is the Christian response. How so in the cases of rape and incest? And, the fact is justice, equality, and compassion is about much more than elimination of the right to choose. Real life is often messy, complicated, and so dependent upon circumstance.
Michael Coren, author and columnist for The Toronto Star who is ordained in the Anglican Church of Canada, reminds us …
“Abortion rates drop when contraceptives are made freely available, modern sex education is taught, paternity payments enforced, women empowered, universal child care provided and poverty combatted. That, and not cruel prohibition, should be the authentic Christian response.”
(Michael Coren. “Does Christianity condemn abortion? That’s not what the Bible says.” The Globe and Mail. June 29, 2022.)
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