Over the past few weeks, the singularly sourced story of an Ohio 10-year-old who allegedly had to travel to Indiana to obtain an abortion metastasized into an official narrative promulgated by global media sources and even President Joe Biden himself. Now, the story, first alleged by Indianapolis OB-GYN Caitlin Bernard, has been partly corroborated.
According to Detective Jeffrey Huhn, the Ohio girl at the heart of this tragedy did indeed obtain a medical abortion, meaning she was likely no more than nine weeks pregnant, in Indianapolis, as Bernard initially claimed. But although Ohio’s heartbeat law restricts almost all abortions, including in cases of rape or incest, after six weeks of gestation, the law makes exceptions for pregnancies that pose a “serious risk of the substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function” to the mother.
State Attorney General Dave Yost confirmed that this exception applied to the girl in question, which makes obvious sense. Even if a girl gets her first period at 10 or younger, she likely has not developed a pelvis capable of safely carrying a pregnancy to term, let alone delivering a live baby. Although most conservatives may disagree with Ohio’s six-week abortion ban failing to include a rape and incest exception, just about nobody of note in the pro-life movement would ever favor denying an abortion when a pregnancy seriously imperils the life and physical health of the mother.
OK, so what about the Democratic half of the equation? The man charged with raping the girl in question is Gershon Fuentes, whom police allege confessed to assaulting the girl on at least two occasions. Buried in the lede: Fuentes is reportedly an illegal immigrant. According to Fox News’s Bill Melugin, ICE has placed a detainer on Fuentes, a Guatemalan national.
This story became the story for a time because Democrats were convinced that Republicans in Ohio wouldn’t let the child in question get an abortion, an assertion that is demonstrably false. The only newsworthy question as a matter of policy now is just how an illegal migrant was able to enter and then stay in the country long enough to rape a 10-year-old child multiple times.
So what will Democrats do? Will they now encourage deporting the alleged rapist in question, and would they support preventing prospective criminals from illegally crossing the southern border in the first place? Republican law allowed for a grim but necessary solution, in part, to this terrible tragedy. What would Democrats have done to prevent it to begin with?
