Comment Last week, a sordid story came out of Ohio. A 10-year-old girl — a rape victim, in case you need spelling — was pregnant and needed an abortion. But his reversal Roe v. Wade had prompted a nationwide ban on terminations after six weeks of pregnancy, so that child would either give birth to her alleged rapist’s baby or have to cross state lines to end his miserable condition. A doctor named Caitlin Bernard was consulted on the case and spoke about it to the Indiana news source IndyStar. The case generated headlines and a quote from President Biden — “Imagine being that little girl,” he said — and then some parties began to wonder aloud whether the story was so bad it couldn’t be true. Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost (R) said there was “not one scintilla of evidence” to support the story. South Dakota Gov. Christy Noem (R) tweeted: “Looks like the story was fake in the first place.” A reporter with the Daily Caller presented, as apparent evidence that the story was a fabrication, the fact that the doctor who had publicized the case refused to offer additional information. Other members of the media also cast doubt on the story. The Wall Street Journal editorial board criticized Biden for perpetuating an “improbable story from a biased source that fits the progressive narrative perfectly, but cannot be confirmed.” The Washington Post Fact Checker column wrote carefully about the case, particularly the fact that it was attributed to only one source (the doctor) and the fact that abortions performed at 10-year-olds are “fairly rare.” (“The point of the piece was to highlight the need for careful reporting in an age when information spreads quickly,” Shani George, Washington Post vice president of communications, said in a statement.) Then on Wednesday, a new development: a reporter from the Columbus Dispatch attended the arraignment of the alleged rapist, Gerson Fuentes, 27, who police said confessed to raping the child at least twice. So the story was true, God help us all. This was no cause for fascination. When a child gets pregnant before losing their last tooth and the situation they live in tries to make it stay that way, there are no winners. we have all lost irreparably. But we have to stop and think for a minute about how some people reacted to this story when it was first published. Because it was a disaster. Beginning with the journalists: A good doctor had gone to the minutes to discuss the case of the 10-year-old. In every other medical story I can think of, a doctor sharing a patient’s story would be considered highly credible. If a surgeon describes removing a tumor for a larger article on new surgical techniques, we don’t require that we talk to the cancer survivor. What exactly did my colleagues in the media think the doctor — bound by HIPAA — was supposed to do? Issue a press release with the name and address of a minor sexual assault victim? If members of the media thought the doctor was lying—and their dubious opinions did not suggest a better explanation—then they could have used other investigative methods to verify the story. This is apparently what the Star and Dispatch reporters did. They combed public records and ended up sitting in the courtroom as the judge considered bail for the alleged perpetrator of this heinous crime. (After the alleged rapist was arrested, the Washington Post added an update to the Fact Checker story and published a story about the arrest. The Wall Street Journal and Daily Caller also published new pieces.) Moving on to the attorney general: In an interview, Yost said, “I know the police officers and the prosecutors in this situation. There is not one of them that does not turn over every rock, look for this guy and charge him. They wouldn’t let him loose on the streets.” But that ignores the fact that sexual harassment crimes are undercharged, that rapists end up “out on the streets” all the time. Only about 30 percent of sexual assaults are ever reported to the police, according to the National Rape, Abuse and Incest Network, and less than 1 percent result in a conviction. Cops and prosecutors can turn over every rock they come across, but that doesn’t address common scenarios when it comes to child rape. Young girls are often not attacked by strangers hiding under rocks. they are attacked by their own fathers, stepfathers and uncles, who force silence from their vulnerable victims by threatening to harm the girls’ families. It is not rare that 10-year-old children are attacked, it is rare that their attackers are caught and punished. Finally, ending with politicians and pundits who decided that throwing a 10-year-old and her doctor under the bus was the best move for their political movement. Of course they would prefer the story to be fiction. Admitting that the story was true would require admitting that there are some cases in which abortion is not only a necessity, but a mercy. It is not only acceptable, it can be ethical. It’s not a lifesaver for a potential child, it’s a lifesaver for an existing child, a 10-year-old girl who had allegedly been raped by a man nearly three times her age and was now facing the prospect of putting her little feet in stirrups and they tear her from the act of childbirth. A caesarean section might have been used. It would be better; Major surgery on a child that we forced to give birth to another child? Sorry for the graphic images, but this is a fictional story. A girl was attacked, and then punished again by her government, and then challenged by journalists whose job it is to seek the truth, and then used as a political pawn by politicians disturbed by the consequences of her situation. The truth came out in the end. But only after many adults turned a miserable story about a child into a damning story about themselves.
