Jeffrey St. Clair's Roaming Charges with a summary of the freak out over the 10 year old's abortion.
+ Last week, I wrote a brief entry on the appalling case of a 10-year-old Ohio girl who became pregnant after being raped. She was only nine when she was repeatedly raped. By the time she saw a child abuse doctor, she was six weeks and three days pregnant. Unable to legally get an abortion in her home state, the girl was forced to travel to Indianapolis for the termination of her pregnancy, where the procedure is still barely legal and is likely to soon be banned altogether.
This disturbing case was reported two reporters for the Indianapolis Star as part of a wider story on women from neighboring states coming to Indiana for abortions and the strain it was putting on the few abortion clinics left in the Hoosier state. As part of that story, the Star reporters interviewed the doctor who had performed the operation on the ten-year old Ohio girl. In order to protect her patient’s privacy rights–both medical and as a juvenile victim of a sex crime–the doctor, Caitlin Bernard, kept her comments brief.
This perceived “vagueness” in her account was used as a bludgeon against her and the reporters. The onslaught started with a truly shameful piece in the Washington Post by its press critic Glenn Kessler, who cast doubt on the doctor, the abortion, the rape and the journalists who reported the story. Kessler dismissed the Star’s deeply reported piece as a “one-source” story–this from a paper that routinely runs Bob Woodward on its front page! In this case the story was far from a single source, though the principle source, Dr. Bernard, obviously had first-hand knowledge of the case and put herself on the record (and in the line of fire.) What Kessler didn’t bother to find out was that the Star reporters had been working on both aspects of the story (the rape and the abortion) with journalists at Gannett and the Columbus Dispatch. No matter. Kessler’s despicable piece opened the floodgates and the most toxic flotsam of the right rushed through.
Fox News (Hannity, Watters, Ingraham, Carlson, et al) began doxing the doctor, placing her name and photo on segments calling the rape and abortion a hoax. The rightwing AG of Ohio, Dave Yost, declared that there was “not a whisper of evidence” that the rape of a 10-year-old had taken place. Jim Jordan tweeted out that the doctor’s story was “a lie.” Jonathan Turley wrote a rancid piece for the NY Post–the go-to venue for this kind of tripe–denouncing the case as a politically-motivated “activist’s tale” that “looks like a lie.” The WSJ editorial page ran a savage piece titled: “An Abortion Story Too Good to Confirm.” Tucker Carlson’s wingman, Glenn Greenwald–last seen feting the virtues of Jair Bolsonaro –sprang up out of his squawk box to proclaim the “evidence woefully inadequate” and the Star’s publication of the story a case of “recklessness” in pursuit of “the Cause.”
Then the news broke that the Columbus police had arrested a suspect in the rape of the 10-year-old girl and that the rape had been reported to the police by Child Services on June 22, confirming nearly every aspect of the reporting by the Star and the Dispatch. Suddenly, the flotsam scrambled to recalibrate. Jim Jordan deleted his “lie” tweet. AG Yost said the girl didn’t have to travel to Indiana to get an abortion. Fox News blamed the rape on illegal immigration. Turley and Greenwald hid behind the caveats that they’d said the case “could be true,” which, of course, only made the smears they wrote more damning not less.
And then there was the ludicrous Indiana Attorney General, a Trumpian Visigoth named Todd Rokita, who declared (on Fox News, naturally, which used the occasion to flash yet another photo of Bernard) that he’s launching an investigation into Dr. Bernard for failing to report the rape that only a day earlier he didn’t think had happened: “We’re gathering the evidence as we speak, and we’re going to fight this to the end, including looking at her licensure. If she failed to report it in Indiana, it’s a crime for — to not report, to intentionally not report.”
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