I am beyond disappointed that your writer, Kathy Young, immediately jumped on the right wing “Did it really happen” bandwagon. I’m very angry about this. In writing her article she called into question everyone involved in this tragedy- the victim and her family, the doctors, especially Dr. Bernard the Ob-Gyn who broke the story to the Indy Star. She questioned it all.
Why did she do it? Apparently because Dr. Bernard was the only source and Ms. Young found that very suspicious. Yes, I know she wasn’t alone in her suspicion. Glenn Kessler from the Washington Post led this crusade in the MSM. Ms. Young did not have to join him but she chose to do just that.
Her suspicion, followed by the writing of her column, shows an absolute misunderstanding of how a situation like the rape and pregnancy of a 10 year old could absolutely be true without finding immediate corroboration. One of your readers who has years of experience with this type of case repeatedly tried to point out to Ms Young the fallacy of her thinking but she would have none of it.
The types of post Roe abortion horror stories that will come to light are not going to fit into some nice, neat, predetermined package. They will be ugly and messy and yes sometimes without multiple sources. To immediately “question” if they are a hoax is beyond disgusting.
As a follow up, the Indiana Attorney General, Todd Rokita, has announced an investigation into Dr. Bernard under the guise of determining whether or not she followed the child abuse reporting standards. He’s going after her medical license. This is real and it’s happening in a ruby red state with an extreme right wing attorney general.
Joe Biden has brought us what we needed; a stable, functioning government without the chaos and lunacy of prior years. He has a speech impediment and I think he is aging well. I don’t care if he runs in 2024 because I will vote for whoever Democrat is on the ballot. The only way to heal the Republican Party is to defeat them soundly in the elections and send the message that we cannot tolerate far right extremism in our Democracy. The Democratic Party at this point stands for stability and decency and that’s what I hope most people want in their representatives.
I posted several comments about Ms. Young's piece when she first wrote it. I won't repeat it all here; if you want to read them, I'm sure they're still available. I do want to say two things more, however.
First, the skepticism with which so many greeted the idea of a ten-year-old being in need of an abortion, that such young children get raped, is one of the reasons why it can be so difficult to get a conviction in a child SA case with a very young victim. Unless you are "lucky" enough to have physical evidence, such as DNA from an aborted fetus, to confirm the child's testimony. (Obviously with boys we can't get that.) There are just enough people in this world who simply refuse to accept facts because those facts are too "icky." It's hard enough to go through a jury trial with a child victim. Re-trying such a case if there's a hung jury...no. People wonder why we engage in plea agreements. This is one of the reasons why.
Second, Ms. Young and Washington Post fact-checker Kessler engaged in journalistic malpractice, and therefore hypocrisy. They criticized the Indiana paper for running such a "sensational" story based on a single source without making any effort to try to find out whether corroboration in the usual journalistic sense was possible. All it would have taken for Ms. Young or Mr. Kessler to learn why such corroboration is unlikely is a fifteen-minute phone conversation with someone like me (or a seasoned CPS worker, SANE nurse or detective specializing in child maltreatment cases) to explain how such cases are investigated and all the privacy rules and laws that surround them. But they were too lazy to do that.
Don't writers for the Bulwark have editors? Someone should have caught this.
I'm glad the man who did this has been caught and that the evidence is apparently so strong. He will very likely get what he deserves. The little girl? She's not getting what she deserves.
Cathy Young needed to retract and apologize for her appalling opinion piece on the Ohio rape case. She couldn’t wait to join forces with the RW mob, in spite of a doctor (whom the IN AG announced to Jesse Watters will now be prosecuted) stating that she did the procedure. Young didn’t have to announce that the abortion did happen; she could have just kept quiet. But no.
This “update” doesn’t cut it. You can’t update irresponsible writing. You have to apologize for it.
What has been exasperating about Cathy Young's essay (and more importantly her follow up responses in the comments) as well as Amanda Carpenter's statements in the Monday podcast, is the cognitive dissonance that was on display to support their underlying position: Abortion is bad.
When presented with a horrible situation that shows that, yes abortions are bad, but some other things are worse and that abortions are sometimes needed, they reflexively went looking for anything to dismiss the story. (Sound familiar? See: Ms Hutchinson's testimony and subsequent "debunking" of the SS/Trump battle in the Suburban)
The Bulwark has been very good about not falling into that trap of cognitive dissonance, but on this topic, you failed. (For a publication that is constantly failing, See: National Review)
We should ALL use this as a reminder that even those of us who try not to fall into that trap (and The Bulwark has been VERY good at not doing it), sometimes do, and that we need to always be cognizant of our human ability to do so.
Finding myself still upset about Cathy's piece. When I read it on Sunday, I was surprised that she (and Glen Kessler) felt justified in casting doubt on the story without having any positive evidence it wasn't true. The surprise turned to frustration when Cathy stubbornly clung to her skepticism in the comments, making assertions that she was not qualified to make (pregnancy in 10-year-olds is so rare that the story is unlikely; surely such a pregnancy would qualify for "life of the mother" exceptions). The result of the whole thing is that Cathy, and unfortunately The Bulwark, have now themselves harmed the discourse with disinformation. All week, until yesterday, I heard journalists hasten to qualify their reports on the situation by saying things like, "well, now there's some doubt this happened," or "we should mention questions are being raised..." and lo and behold, the story WAS true and not impossible or unlikely, as reader after reader tried to convince Cathy. How many people (who don't follow the news as obsessively as Bulwark readers do) will only remember the headlines like "Did It Happen? and miss the follow up news that, yes, it did! Cathy has every right to be skeptical of a story as horrifying as this one; none of us wants to think it could happen. But she had even less evidence to assert its possible falsehood than the evidence the original reporter provided to Glen Kessler. I love The Bulwark and I will keep my subscription. But I don't care to read Cathy's pieces anymore.
The thing I find the most disingenuous about the Cathy young critique of the abortion story is that it is like so many right wing stories that criticize the media (I don’t says msm for a reason which I’ll explain). There are 1000s and 1000s of stories a day coming from great journalists from all around the country and if one bubbles up that conflicts with a view or value held by the right it is immediately attacked ruthlessly by the right wing so that their audience never has to deal with a value that conflicts with real life experiences. This is what drives me nuts about opinion writes who do the “both sides” from the right. A reporter or witness in court could tell you that trump walked into the west wing with a gun and held pence’s children as hostages in order to overturn the election and the right wing media ecosystem would attack it because it happened in the east wing of the White House. Here is an idea for the right: if you don’t believe the reporting than do reporting!!! The right media is literally all opinion and 0 actual reporting now. They don’t even try to break stories for themselves.
I have a question for everyone who expects a president “to bring the country together.” Name a member of the other party who would be acceptable to you.
Re the Ohio rape case. It is astonishing how quickly the perp was identified. And woe to those who jumped on the story as fake. The tidbits revealed suggest that it would have been easy for a reporter to find that the story was true - before it came to this. After all, Franklin County is home to the state capitol and is the largest Ohio county. Were I a reporter, I would have called child services in Ohio. It is clear that the Ohio attorney general was lying (that he had made any effort to verify the story)
Last Sunday, Cathy Young wrote about the possibility that the story about the raped 10-year-old girl having to cross state lines for an abortion might be false.
She raised some legitimate points, and I have no issue with that. However, when people with professional expertise provided explanations in the comments to address her questions, she was, in my opinion, defensive and dismissive and just doubled down.
Well, now it turns out the account was true and that the rapist has confessed and been arrested:
I am hoping Ms. Young will acknowledge she was wrong, which is okay, and will apologize for being so dismissive to readers with more knowledge and experience with these matters than she does, which is not okay.
I'm tired of seeing Disastrous Poll Numbers and hearing words like Underwater and Catastrophic. Frankly most Americans think what they're told to think by the media they watch. Right wing and mainstream media talk about two things: Biden's Disastrous Oldness and his Catastrophic Poll Numbers. I would love to see any of his actual accomplishments get a headline anywhere. Instead, the Economist's prediction dating from before Biden's trip to the mideast is typical: Why Biden's Middle Eastern Trip Is Bound To Fail. I can't be the only one who is sick of this narrative. More substance, less "poll numbers" please.
Here's a better analysis from Lucian K. Truscott IV, also on Substack:
Open in browser
I would call this a new low, but...
There will be an even lower low any minute now
Lucian K. Truscott IV
Jul 14
Comment
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You knew it was going to happen, and now here it is: the right-wing noise machine swung into full-power mode after it was reported that a 10-year-old girl who was raped in Ohio had to travel to Indiana to get an abortion. The story was first reported in the Indianapolis Star by Shari Rudavsky, who has been the paper’s lead health reporter for something like 18 years.
There was no reason to doubt the report. It was printed in a first-line municipal newspaper by a reporter well known in the city of Indianapolis. Even before the Supreme Court handed down its Dobbs decision overturning Roe v Wade and returning control of abortion laws to the states, it was predicted that an underage girl would someday be raped and be caused to go somewhere other than her home state to obtain an abortion because red states almost immediately began passing laws outlawing abortion the day the court issued its decision.
That was what happened in Ohio. Soon after the Dobbs decision was announced, Governor Mike DeWine ordered that a law would go into effect banning abortions after 6 weeks of pregnancy. The law had been passed in 2019 and sat dormant until the Supreme Court decided Dobbs. By the time the little girl in Ohio discovered that the rape she had suffered had made her pregnant, she was three days past the deadline.
The story didn’t set off any alarm bells until this Tuesday when the Wall Street Journal published an editorial essentially calling the story about the 10-year-old girl a lie. “There is no evidence the girl exists,” the editorial said. Despite first-hand reporting in the Indianapolis Star from an interview with the Indianapolis doctor who performed the abortion, the editorial called the story “a fanciful tale.”
Fox News jumped right on it. Tucker Carlson went on his show and said the story was “not true.” Another Fox News host claimed that abortion rights activists were lying about a “fake victim.” A jerk named Dave Yost, who somehow got himself elected attorney general of Ohio, went on another Fox show and called the story about the 10-year-old rape victim from his state – whose rapist he should have been pursuing and prosecuting – “a fabrication” and claimed there was no “evidence” to support the story.
There was a serious problem with the Ohio attorney general’s blithe assertion that the whole thing about the 10-year-old girl was made up. A 27-year-old Ohio man was arrested on Tuesday and charged with raping the girl. According to a report in the Columbus Dispatch, the rapist, one Carlos Fuentes, admitted to raping the girl at least two times. The Dispatch reported that a detective testified at the man’s arraignment yesterday that Columbus police had been aware of the rape since June 22 when her mother had called Child Protective Services. The detective went on to confirm that on June 30, the 10-year-old girl had a “medical abortion” in Indianapolis.
Ohio Congressman Jim Jordan got his two cents in with a Tuesday Tweet claiming that the Ohio attorney general’s office had “not found any evidence of a 10-year-old rape victim in the state.” He then took a swat at President Biden for referring to the story in a statement he made on Monday, implying that Biden had lied.
When the rapist was arrested, Jordan deleted the tweet without an apology to either the 10-year-old rape victim or Biden.
I am going to pause here for a moment because I just realized that I have typed the words “10-year-old girl” seven times. It becomes almost automatic in a story like this where you have to mention the subject of the story over and over.
She is 10-years-old and she was raped twice and before she is old enough to go to junior high school, she has had to have an abortion.
Think about it for a moment. Not only is she going to live with the fact of the rapes and the fact of the abortion for the rest of her life, these stories saying it was all a lie, that she was a “fake victim,” will be on the internet and on social media forever. Her children will be able to read the lies about her, and so will her grandchildren. And what they will read will be disgusting lies perpetrated by disgusting people without a thought in the world about the girl, or her life today, or what her life will someday become.
They are spreading disgusting lies to get votes, that’s what they’re doing, and they are willing to ruin a 10-year-old girl’s life to do it.
Today, another disgusting Republican jerk, the Attorney General of Indiana, decided they haven’t gone far enough in trashing the girl and he made the astonishing announcement that his office was opening an investigation of the doctor who performed the abortion on the 10-year-old rape victim.
You would think that the right wing would try to crawl under a rock when a story proved to be true about the nightmare scenario that was predicted to happen after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade. But no. First, they call the girl who was raped a liar, then they shame her for traveling across state lines to abort the fetus produced by the rape, then they go after the doctor who performed a legal abortion on her so she would not have to give birth to her rapist’s baby.
It's a Republican trifecta: cruelty dipped in lies ladled on top of an abuse of power.
Watch this space. Republicans are going to do it again. And again. And again.
Another reason to vote for a Democratic president: any Republican president would pardon Trump and all of his enablers and co-conspirators the first day in office. With people like that on the loose, the damage they're doing now would escalate and our country would be well and truly lost.
I'm missing the apology here. Obviously, it should come mainly from Glenn Kessler, but the bandwagon jumpers all have their apologies to make for going along with it. How often does a story about a medical procedure with a NAMED source draw this kind of incredulity? And I would say this even if it were not the case that the reporter named, Shari Rudavsky, is a seasoned, experienced, highly respected senior reporter without a blemish on her record. (Also, she's my sister-in-law.)
"So we’d get endless hearings into Hunter’s laptop, one or two impeachments of Biden, radical culture war legislation, national abortion bans, endless relitigation of the 2020 election, gridlock, government shutdowns, and perhaps even defaults on the debt."
Don't forget undermining NATO (likely fatally) and resuming the appeasement of Vladimir Vladimirovich, at Ukraine's peril.
The worst part about that story out of Ohio? The fracking Indiana AG is now investigating the doctor. There is no room for understanding or caring anymore, it's all just about the culture war
Yes, it did happen.
I am beyond disappointed that your writer, Kathy Young, immediately jumped on the right wing “Did it really happen” bandwagon. I’m very angry about this. In writing her article she called into question everyone involved in this tragedy- the victim and her family, the doctors, especially Dr. Bernard the Ob-Gyn who broke the story to the Indy Star. She questioned it all.
Why did she do it? Apparently because Dr. Bernard was the only source and Ms. Young found that very suspicious. Yes, I know she wasn’t alone in her suspicion. Glenn Kessler from the Washington Post led this crusade in the MSM. Ms. Young did not have to join him but she chose to do just that.
Her suspicion, followed by the writing of her column, shows an absolute misunderstanding of how a situation like the rape and pregnancy of a 10 year old could absolutely be true without finding immediate corroboration. One of your readers who has years of experience with this type of case repeatedly tried to point out to Ms Young the fallacy of her thinking but she would have none of it.
The types of post Roe abortion horror stories that will come to light are not going to fit into some nice, neat, predetermined package. They will be ugly and messy and yes sometimes without multiple sources. To immediately “question” if they are a hoax is beyond disgusting.
As a follow up, the Indiana Attorney General, Todd Rokita, has announced an investigation into Dr. Bernard under the guise of determining whether or not she followed the child abuse reporting standards. He’s going after her medical license. This is real and it’s happening in a ruby red state with an extreme right wing attorney general.
Joe Biden has brought us what we needed; a stable, functioning government without the chaos and lunacy of prior years. He has a speech impediment and I think he is aging well. I don’t care if he runs in 2024 because I will vote for whoever Democrat is on the ballot. The only way to heal the Republican Party is to defeat them soundly in the elections and send the message that we cannot tolerate far right extremism in our Democracy. The Democratic Party at this point stands for stability and decency and that’s what I hope most people want in their representatives.
I posted several comments about Ms. Young's piece when she first wrote it. I won't repeat it all here; if you want to read them, I'm sure they're still available. I do want to say two things more, however.
First, the skepticism with which so many greeted the idea of a ten-year-old being in need of an abortion, that such young children get raped, is one of the reasons why it can be so difficult to get a conviction in a child SA case with a very young victim. Unless you are "lucky" enough to have physical evidence, such as DNA from an aborted fetus, to confirm the child's testimony. (Obviously with boys we can't get that.) There are just enough people in this world who simply refuse to accept facts because those facts are too "icky." It's hard enough to go through a jury trial with a child victim. Re-trying such a case if there's a hung jury...no. People wonder why we engage in plea agreements. This is one of the reasons why.
Second, Ms. Young and Washington Post fact-checker Kessler engaged in journalistic malpractice, and therefore hypocrisy. They criticized the Indiana paper for running such a "sensational" story based on a single source without making any effort to try to find out whether corroboration in the usual journalistic sense was possible. All it would have taken for Ms. Young or Mr. Kessler to learn why such corroboration is unlikely is a fifteen-minute phone conversation with someone like me (or a seasoned CPS worker, SANE nurse or detective specializing in child maltreatment cases) to explain how such cases are investigated and all the privacy rules and laws that surround them. But they were too lazy to do that.
Don't writers for the Bulwark have editors? Someone should have caught this.
I'm glad the man who did this has been caught and that the evidence is apparently so strong. He will very likely get what he deserves. The little girl? She's not getting what she deserves.
Cathy Young needed to retract and apologize for her appalling opinion piece on the Ohio rape case. She couldn’t wait to join forces with the RW mob, in spite of a doctor (whom the IN AG announced to Jesse Watters will now be prosecuted) stating that she did the procedure. Young didn’t have to announce that the abortion did happen; she could have just kept quiet. But no.
This “update” doesn’t cut it. You can’t update irresponsible writing. You have to apologize for it.
RE: Yes, it did happen.
Thank you for the correction.
What has been exasperating about Cathy Young's essay (and more importantly her follow up responses in the comments) as well as Amanda Carpenter's statements in the Monday podcast, is the cognitive dissonance that was on display to support their underlying position: Abortion is bad.
When presented with a horrible situation that shows that, yes abortions are bad, but some other things are worse and that abortions are sometimes needed, they reflexively went looking for anything to dismiss the story. (Sound familiar? See: Ms Hutchinson's testimony and subsequent "debunking" of the SS/Trump battle in the Suburban)
The Bulwark has been very good about not falling into that trap of cognitive dissonance, but on this topic, you failed. (For a publication that is constantly failing, See: National Review)
We should ALL use this as a reminder that even those of us who try not to fall into that trap (and The Bulwark has been VERY good at not doing it), sometimes do, and that we need to always be cognizant of our human ability to do so.
Finding myself still upset about Cathy's piece. When I read it on Sunday, I was surprised that she (and Glen Kessler) felt justified in casting doubt on the story without having any positive evidence it wasn't true. The surprise turned to frustration when Cathy stubbornly clung to her skepticism in the comments, making assertions that she was not qualified to make (pregnancy in 10-year-olds is so rare that the story is unlikely; surely such a pregnancy would qualify for "life of the mother" exceptions). The result of the whole thing is that Cathy, and unfortunately The Bulwark, have now themselves harmed the discourse with disinformation. All week, until yesterday, I heard journalists hasten to qualify their reports on the situation by saying things like, "well, now there's some doubt this happened," or "we should mention questions are being raised..." and lo and behold, the story WAS true and not impossible or unlikely, as reader after reader tried to convince Cathy. How many people (who don't follow the news as obsessively as Bulwark readers do) will only remember the headlines like "Did It Happen? and miss the follow up news that, yes, it did! Cathy has every right to be skeptical of a story as horrifying as this one; none of us wants to think it could happen. But she had even less evidence to assert its possible falsehood than the evidence the original reporter provided to Glen Kessler. I love The Bulwark and I will keep my subscription. But I don't care to read Cathy's pieces anymore.
The thing I find the most disingenuous about the Cathy young critique of the abortion story is that it is like so many right wing stories that criticize the media (I don’t says msm for a reason which I’ll explain). There are 1000s and 1000s of stories a day coming from great journalists from all around the country and if one bubbles up that conflicts with a view or value held by the right it is immediately attacked ruthlessly by the right wing so that their audience never has to deal with a value that conflicts with real life experiences. This is what drives me nuts about opinion writes who do the “both sides” from the right. A reporter or witness in court could tell you that trump walked into the west wing with a gun and held pence’s children as hostages in order to overturn the election and the right wing media ecosystem would attack it because it happened in the east wing of the White House. Here is an idea for the right: if you don’t believe the reporting than do reporting!!! The right media is literally all opinion and 0 actual reporting now. They don’t even try to break stories for themselves.
I have a question for everyone who expects a president “to bring the country together.” Name a member of the other party who would be acceptable to you.
Re the Ohio rape case. It is astonishing how quickly the perp was identified. And woe to those who jumped on the story as fake. The tidbits revealed suggest that it would have been easy for a reporter to find that the story was true - before it came to this. After all, Franklin County is home to the state capitol and is the largest Ohio county. Were I a reporter, I would have called child services in Ohio. It is clear that the Ohio attorney general was lying (that he had made any effort to verify the story)
Last Sunday, Cathy Young wrote about the possibility that the story about the raped 10-year-old girl having to cross state lines for an abortion might be false.
She raised some legitimate points, and I have no issue with that. However, when people with professional expertise provided explanations in the comments to address her questions, she was, in my opinion, defensive and dismissive and just doubled down.
Well, now it turns out the account was true and that the rapist has confessed and been arrested:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/07/13/abortion-girl-rape-victim-arrest-ohio/
I am hoping Ms. Young will acknowledge she was wrong, which is okay, and will apologize for being so dismissive to readers with more knowledge and experience with these matters than she does, which is not okay.
I'm tired of seeing Disastrous Poll Numbers and hearing words like Underwater and Catastrophic. Frankly most Americans think what they're told to think by the media they watch. Right wing and mainstream media talk about two things: Biden's Disastrous Oldness and his Catastrophic Poll Numbers. I would love to see any of his actual accomplishments get a headline anywhere. Instead, the Economist's prediction dating from before Biden's trip to the mideast is typical: Why Biden's Middle Eastern Trip Is Bound To Fail. I can't be the only one who is sick of this narrative. More substance, less "poll numbers" please.
Here's a better analysis from Lucian K. Truscott IV, also on Substack:
Open in browser
I would call this a new low, but...
There will be an even lower low any minute now
Lucian K. Truscott IV
Jul 14
Comment
Share
You knew it was going to happen, and now here it is: the right-wing noise machine swung into full-power mode after it was reported that a 10-year-old girl who was raped in Ohio had to travel to Indiana to get an abortion. The story was first reported in the Indianapolis Star by Shari Rudavsky, who has been the paper’s lead health reporter for something like 18 years.
There was no reason to doubt the report. It was printed in a first-line municipal newspaper by a reporter well known in the city of Indianapolis. Even before the Supreme Court handed down its Dobbs decision overturning Roe v Wade and returning control of abortion laws to the states, it was predicted that an underage girl would someday be raped and be caused to go somewhere other than her home state to obtain an abortion because red states almost immediately began passing laws outlawing abortion the day the court issued its decision.
That was what happened in Ohio. Soon after the Dobbs decision was announced, Governor Mike DeWine ordered that a law would go into effect banning abortions after 6 weeks of pregnancy. The law had been passed in 2019 and sat dormant until the Supreme Court decided Dobbs. By the time the little girl in Ohio discovered that the rape she had suffered had made her pregnant, she was three days past the deadline.
The story didn’t set off any alarm bells until this Tuesday when the Wall Street Journal published an editorial essentially calling the story about the 10-year-old girl a lie. “There is no evidence the girl exists,” the editorial said. Despite first-hand reporting in the Indianapolis Star from an interview with the Indianapolis doctor who performed the abortion, the editorial called the story “a fanciful tale.”
Fox News jumped right on it. Tucker Carlson went on his show and said the story was “not true.” Another Fox News host claimed that abortion rights activists were lying about a “fake victim.” A jerk named Dave Yost, who somehow got himself elected attorney general of Ohio, went on another Fox show and called the story about the 10-year-old rape victim from his state – whose rapist he should have been pursuing and prosecuting – “a fabrication” and claimed there was no “evidence” to support the story.
There was a serious problem with the Ohio attorney general’s blithe assertion that the whole thing about the 10-year-old girl was made up. A 27-year-old Ohio man was arrested on Tuesday and charged with raping the girl. According to a report in the Columbus Dispatch, the rapist, one Carlos Fuentes, admitted to raping the girl at least two times. The Dispatch reported that a detective testified at the man’s arraignment yesterday that Columbus police had been aware of the rape since June 22 when her mother had called Child Protective Services. The detective went on to confirm that on June 30, the 10-year-old girl had a “medical abortion” in Indianapolis.
Ohio Congressman Jim Jordan got his two cents in with a Tuesday Tweet claiming that the Ohio attorney general’s office had “not found any evidence of a 10-year-old rape victim in the state.” He then took a swat at President Biden for referring to the story in a statement he made on Monday, implying that Biden had lied.
When the rapist was arrested, Jordan deleted the tweet without an apology to either the 10-year-old rape victim or Biden.
I am going to pause here for a moment because I just realized that I have typed the words “10-year-old girl” seven times. It becomes almost automatic in a story like this where you have to mention the subject of the story over and over.
She is 10-years-old and she was raped twice and before she is old enough to go to junior high school, she has had to have an abortion.
Think about it for a moment. Not only is she going to live with the fact of the rapes and the fact of the abortion for the rest of her life, these stories saying it was all a lie, that she was a “fake victim,” will be on the internet and on social media forever. Her children will be able to read the lies about her, and so will her grandchildren. And what they will read will be disgusting lies perpetrated by disgusting people without a thought in the world about the girl, or her life today, or what her life will someday become.
They are spreading disgusting lies to get votes, that’s what they’re doing, and they are willing to ruin a 10-year-old girl’s life to do it.
Today, another disgusting Republican jerk, the Attorney General of Indiana, decided they haven’t gone far enough in trashing the girl and he made the astonishing announcement that his office was opening an investigation of the doctor who performed the abortion on the 10-year-old rape victim.
You would think that the right wing would try to crawl under a rock when a story proved to be true about the nightmare scenario that was predicted to happen after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade. But no. First, they call the girl who was raped a liar, then they shame her for traveling across state lines to abort the fetus produced by the rape, then they go after the doctor who performed a legal abortion on her so she would not have to give birth to her rapist’s baby.
It's a Republican trifecta: cruelty dipped in lies ladled on top of an abuse of power.
Watch this space. Republicans are going to do it again. And again. And again.
Another reason to vote for a Democratic president: any Republican president would pardon Trump and all of his enablers and co-conspirators the first day in office. With people like that on the loose, the damage they're doing now would escalate and our country would be well and truly lost.
I'm missing the apology here. Obviously, it should come mainly from Glenn Kessler, but the bandwagon jumpers all have their apologies to make for going along with it. How often does a story about a medical procedure with a NAMED source draw this kind of incredulity? And I would say this even if it were not the case that the reporter named, Shari Rudavsky, is a seasoned, experienced, highly respected senior reporter without a blemish on her record. (Also, she's my sister-in-law.)
"So we’d get endless hearings into Hunter’s laptop, one or two impeachments of Biden, radical culture war legislation, national abortion bans, endless relitigation of the 2020 election, gridlock, government shutdowns, and perhaps even defaults on the debt."
Don't forget undermining NATO (likely fatally) and resuming the appeasement of Vladimir Vladimirovich, at Ukraine's peril.
The worst part about that story out of Ohio? The fracking Indiana AG is now investigating the doctor. There is no room for understanding or caring anymore, it's all just about the culture war