In the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade, Democrats and pro-choice advocates have been looking all over the country for inflammatory stories to stoke abortion alarmism. They seemed to have found it this past week in Ohio, when a story emerged of a 10-year-old girl who had been assaulted and forced to travel across state lines to get an abortion because of a pro-life law restricting the procedure.
The story, however, is much more complicated than abortion supporters and their allies in the media would like to admit.
On Wednesday, Ohio law enforcement officials revealed that they had arrested the man accused of assaulting and impregnating the young girl. The man, 27-year-old Gershon Fuentes, was an illegal immigrant from Guatemala. Not much else is known about the attack.
What we do know is that the girl was reportedly taken to Indiana, where abortion provider Caitlin Bernard claims to have been asked by a child-abuse doctor in Ohio to help the girl get an abortion. She said that because the young girl was more than six weeks along, which is usually when a fetal heartbeat can be detected, and because Ohio’s restrictions do not include exceptions for cases of rape or incest, she would not have been able to get an abortion in her home state.
But this is not true. Ohio’s law grants exceptions in cases of “serious risk of the substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function.” This exception is much broader than a typical exception for cases in which the life of the mother is at risk, as Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost noted. And in this young girl’s case, there is no question that requiring a 10-year-old to carry a pregnancy to term and give birth would harm her body irreparably. Yost even argued that “she did not have to leave Ohio.”
But because there is so much confusion about what Ohio’s pro-life law is and does, and because pro-choice advocates would rather rely on this confusion and hyperbole to stir up their base, this young girl’s story became national news. They’ve treated her like a political pawn rather than a victim.
Pro-choice advocates like to claim that abortion restrictions will endanger the lives of women. But really, their refusal to engage with pro-life laws honestly and accurately report what they do and do not do will harm far more women. It’s dangerous, but deliberate.
