The voters of Kansas just rejected a Republican effort to ban abortion on Tuesday — but that doesn't seem to have deterred Republicans elsewhere in the region. Instead, both the misogynistic and the anti-democratic views of the modern Republican Party were on full display in Indiana on Thursday as the state's GOP-led legislature debated over how hard they plan to ban abortion in the wake of the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade.
Indiana has been on the national radar recently after a story about a 10-year-old pregnant rape victim from Ohio became the center of the country's debate over abortion bans. Due to Ohio's draconian abortion ban, the girl was forced to travel to Indiana to avoid being forced to birth a rapist's baby. The entire story was horrifying on its own, but Republicans swiftly made the situation worse by spinning like tops to avoid admitting that these kinds of stories are the natural result of their preferred policies. First, the GOP noise machine denied that the story was real and accused the ob-gyn who performed the abortion of being a liar. When the alleged rapist was charged — which is still very rare in rape cases — Republicans pivoted. They played word games to confuse the issue and started a harassment campaign against the doctor, clearly for the purpose of intimidating other people with similar stories into shutting up.
