It takes a particularly cruel, craven sort of conservative mindset to learn that a pre-teen rape survivor had been forced to cross state lines in order to terminate the unwanted pregnancy caused by her violent sexual assault, and immediately set about disparaging the victim and casting doubt on her experience. That, however, was the prevailing attitude of multiple Republican lawmakers and officials in the wake of reports that a 10-year-old Ohio girl had traveled to neighboring Indiana to obtain an abortion, following her home state’s post-Dobbs ban on vital reproductive healthcare access after six weeks of pregnancy.
Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost, Rep. Jim Jordan, and a host of conservative figures and media outlets leapt on the story as having surely been made up by deranged liberals — calling it, at various points, a “hoax” without “a damn scintilla of evidence” behind it, engineered by Democrats to show “the way abortion has been used to cover up statutory rape for all these years.”
