Biden Spreads Likely-Bogus Media Story About Pregnant 10-Year-Old in Making Case for Abortion
I did hear about it. You surely did too. It’s become international news, picked up by the UK’s Independent and Israel’s Jerusalem Post, among others.
But is it true?
Lefties would say, “It could be true,” and that’s right. It could be. In states where abortion is banned with no exceptions, it’s conceivable that a child who’s raped would be forced to carry her attacker’s child to term. And pregnancy as a result of rape does happen, including to children, God help us. Pro-life legislators need to reckon seriously with the prospect.
But did it happen in this case? “Fake but accurate” is still fake, after all.
And if it is fake, the president of the United States shouldn’t be using it as the centerpiece of his abortion messaging. From this morning’s address:
Biden on Republican abortion bans: “A 10-year-old girl should be forced to give birth to a rapist’s child? … I can’t think of anything that’s much more extreme.” pic.twitter.com/bS03moUEtb
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 8, 2022
The story of the pregnant 10-year-old comes from an Indianapolis Star story published last Friday, in which a local obstetrician named Caitlin Bernard described getting a call from a doctor in Ohio. His state had just banned abortion after six weeks and he had a 10-year-old patient who’d been pregnant for six weeks and three days, just missing the cut-off. Would Bernard be willing to perform an abortion on her in Indiana, where it was momentarily still legal, he asked? She agreed to do so, making the case of the pregnant 10-year-old a particularly grim horror story about the hardships created by new abortion restrictions.
Some readers found the story suspicious, though. For starters, abortions performed on girls under 15 are exceptionally rare, accounting for just 0.2 percent of all terminations in the U.S. Six weeks and three days was also a curiously specific timeline given that it must have come from the 10-year-old herself. Was she able to remember the exact date that she was assaulted? Some adult rape victims might struggle to do that amid their trauma. And it seemed especially cruel that she’d be denied an abortion in Ohio after missing the deadline by a mere 72 hours, a detail all but tailor-made to underline the arbitrariness of the new law.
Was it tailor-made? Snopes tried to run down the story a few days ago, with no luck:
Dozens of Snopes readers searched our site or contacted us wondering whether that had actually happened. To find out, we reached out to Dr. Caitlin Bernard, an obstetrician-gynecologist based in Indianapolis and who spoke to The Columbus Dispatch, about the headline-generating story. As of this writing, Bernard had not returned our request for an interview, and we had not been able to independently corroborate the abortion claim. If we receive additional information, will update this post…
As we have previously reported at Snopes, although medical privacy laws prevent health care workers from sharing the personal details of patients publicly, social media posts have circulated widely alleging various harrowing effects of recent abortion bans on pregnant people.
True, privacy laws make this story hard to fact-check. And it’s understandable that the girl’s family would be reluctant to come forward, not wanting to prolong her ordeal by inviting media scrutiny. Confirming Bernard’s account would be difficult even if she were as forthcoming as she could lawfully be.
But what about the rapist? Presumably the Ohio doctor who first treated the girl has a duty to alert police when he has hard evidence that a child has been raped. Assuming the girl knows her attacker’s identity, it’s a slam dunk for cops to haul him in and get him off the streets before he brutalizes another girl.
As far as I’m aware, no arrest has been made. At least, no one in the media has tied any recent arrests for rape or child molestation in Ohio to the case.
The Independent published an interview with Bernard this morning but no further details were provided about the 10-year-old. Instead, she offered opinions like this:
“I think we hear a lot from the ‘right to life’ movement right now, saying, ‘Well, now we have to support women.’ And the question is, ‘well, where has that support been this entire time?’ Not just in their access to abortion … but the support of them and their children with housing and food support and paid family leave and universal health care and access to mental health and substance abuse treatment,” Dr Bernard said.
“It’s really stunning, the hypocrisy.”
Indiana’s legislature is meeting on July 25 to consider tightening abortion restrictions in their own state. One of the most powerful arguments against those restrictions is destined to be the story of the 10-year-old who was freed from carrying her molester’s child thanks only to the leniency of current Indiana law. And there’s currently just one known source for that story, Caitlin Bernard.
Could we at least have the Ohio doctor who supposedly treated the girl come forward and confirm that Bernard is on the level? A little corroboration would go a long way.
Whether true or false, the story is having its intended effect of making Republican politicians squirm:
The story has made national news. But DeWine seemed unprepared Wednesday to discuss whether legislation he championed is forcing children out of state if they don’t want to have their rapists’ babies.
“Yeah, first of all, I have no more information than you do or anybody does. Reading in the in the paper, it came came as you know, from a story out of out of Indiana from from a doctor over there,” he said as part of a rambling answer to a question from the Cincinnati Enquirer, according to a transcript.
DeWine went on to say it was “gut-wrenching” as a father and grandfather to think about a 10-year-old being raped, and that he hoped the doctors caring for her reported the assault to law enforcement. But he didn’t address the fact that a law he signed put girls like her in such an onerous situation.
Like I said, the prospect of raped girls being forced to carry to term under the law is a real one, irrespective of whether Bernard is being honest. But if she made this story up and it’s already coming out of the president’s mouth, I want to know that as a gauge of how carefully the White House is vetting the propaganda it’s promoting.
I’ll leave you with this, via the Washington Free Beacon. At least Biden was coherent when telling the story about the 10-year-old.
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