When The Indianapolis Star reported that a 10-year-old rape victim had to travel to Indiana for an abortion because of the abortion ban in her home state of Ohio, it sounded like the kind of worst-case scenario that abortion rights advocates had warned would come with the fall of Roe v. Wade. It sounded so much like it, in fact, that right-wing media, congressional conservatives and even Ohio’s top prosecutor declared it a bogus story. Then the 27-year-old alleged rapist was arrested.
Even without such vivid confirmation arising so quickly, common sense dictates that this hellish dilemma for women and girls is a real one in the post-Roe world. Those who intentionally created that dilemma are disingenuous to pretend now that it isn’t happening.
It’s not surprising that this story was initially hard to corroborate. Privacy laws are strict regarding medical records and juveniles. But anti-choice voices were remarkably quick to declare the lack of information as being proof of a “hoax,” as one Fox News pundit called it. Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, tweeted that the story was a “lie,” then quietly deleted the tweet after it turned out to be true. A headline on a Wall Street Journal editorial declared it “An Abortion Story Too Good to Confirm.”
