Good journalism - A one-source story about a 10-year-old and an abortion goes viral
"‘Operation Higher Court’: Inside the religious right’s efforts to wine and dine Supreme Court justices "The rightwing US supreme court has climate protection in its sights""
Analysis by Glenn Kessler Staff writer July 9, 2022 at 3:00 a.m. EDT
President Biden delivers remarks on protecting access to abortion health care services on July 8, in Washington, D.C. (Bill O'Leary/The Washington Post)
“This isn’t some imagined horror. It is already happening. Just last week, it was reported that a 10-year-old girl was a rape victim — 10 years old — and she was forced to have to travel out of state to Indiana to seek to terminate the pregnancy and maybe save her life.”
This is the account of a one-source story that quickly went viral around the world — and into the talking points of the president.
The Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, which had guaranteed a right to abortion, has led a number of states to quickly impose new laws to restrict or limit abortions. Ohio was one of the first, imposing a ban on abortions .. https://www.guttmacher.org/fact-sheet/state-facts-about-abortion-ohio .. after six weeks of pregnancy, with no exceptions for rape and incest.
On July 1, the Indianapolis Star, also known as the IndyStar, published an article .. .https://www.indystar.com/story/news/health/2022/07/01/indiana-abortion-law-roe-v-wade-overturned-travel/7779936001/ , written by the newspaper’s medical writer, about how women seeking abortions had begun traveling from Ohio to Indiana, where less restrictive abortion laws were still in place. “Patients head to Indiana for abortion services as other states restrict care,” the article was headlined.
That was a benign headline. But it was the anecdotal beginning that caught the attention of other news organizations. The article said that three days after the June 24 court ruling, an Indianapolis obstetrician-gynecologist, Caitlan Bernard .. https://drcaitlinbernard.wordpress.com/ , who performs abortions, received a call from “a child abuse doctor” in Ohio who had a 10-year-old patient who was six weeks and three days pregnant. Unable to obtain an abortion in Ohio, “the girl soon was on her way to Indiana to Bernard’s care,” the Star reported.
The only source cited for the anecdote was Bernard. She’s on the record, but there is no indication that the newspaper made other attempts to confirm her account. The story’s lead reporter, Shari Rudavsky, did not respond to a query asking whether additional sourcing was obtained. A Gannett spokeswoman provided a comment from Bro Krift .. https://www.indystar.com/staff/4395721002/bro-krift/ , the newspaper’s executive editor: “The facts and sourcing about people crossing state lines into Indiana, including the 10-year-old girl, for abortions are clear. We have no additional comment at this time.”
The story quickly caught fire, becoming a headline in newspapers around the world. News organizations increasingly “aggregate” — or repackage — reporting from elsewhere if it appears of interest to readers. So Bernard remained the only source — and other news organizations did not follow up to confirm her account.
A sampling:
The Daily Mail, July 1: “Child abuse victim, 10, who was six weeks pregnant is forced to travel from Ohio to Indiana for an abortion after home state outlaws it under Roe v Wade ruling.”
The Guardian, July 3: “10-year-old rape victim forced to travel from Ohio to Indiana for abortion.”
The Jerusalem Post, July 3: “10-year-old rape victim denied abortion in Ohio”
Bangladesh Weekly, July 3: “US: 10-year-old Ohio girl denied abortion after abortion ruling”
On CNN’s Sunday interview show on July 3, South Dakota Gov. Kristi L. Noem was pressed .. https://www.politico.com/news/2022/07/03/kristi-noem-abortion-children-00043886 .. about the story. Noem, a Republican who opposes abortion rights, said the story was “tragic” and the focus should be on the rapist. “As much as we can talk about what we can do for that little girl, I think we also need to be addressing those sick individuals that do this to our children,” she said.
Under Ohio law, a physician, as a mandated reporter under Ohio Revised Code 2151.421 .. https://codes.ohio.gov/ohio-revised-code/section-2151.421 , would be required to report any case of known or suspected physical, sexual or emotional abuse or neglect of a child to their local child welfare or law enforcement agency. So Bernard’s colleague would have had to make such a report to law enforcement at the same time he or she contacted Bernard. Presumably then a criminal case would have been opened.
Bernard declined to identify to the Fact Checker her colleague or the city where the child was located. “Thank you for reaching out. I’m sorry, but I don’t have any information to share,” she said in an email.
Dan Tierney, press secretary for Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine (R), said the governor’s office was unaware of any specific case but he said under the state’s decentralized system, records would be held at a local level. Thus, he said, it would be hard to confirm a report without knowing the local jurisdiction to narrow the search. He added: “The rape of a ten-year-old certainly would be newsworthy.”
As a spot check, we contacted child services agencies in some of Ohio’s most populous cities, including Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati, Dayton and Toledo. None of the officials we reached were aware of such a case in their areas.
An abortion by a 10-year-old is pretty rare. The Columbus Dispatch reported that in 2020, 52 people under the age of 15 received an abortion in Ohio.
The Bottom Line
This is a very difficult story to check. Bernard is on the record, but obtaining documents or other confirmation is all but impossible without details that would identify the locality where the rape occurred.
With news reports around the globe and now a presidential imprimatur, however, the story has acquired the status of a “fact” no matter its provenance. If a rapist is ever charged, the fact finally would have more solid grounding.
The ‘elective’ issue: Medical schools are failing to teach doctors to discuss abortion
"‘Operation Higher Court’: Inside the religious right’s efforts to wine and dine Supreme Court justices "The rightwing US supreme court has climate protection in its sights" "
Not only are conservative politicians letting women down in the extreme abortion positions, it seems medical schools are also into it.
Safe, legal abortion is an essential part of health care. Nearly one-quarter of American women will have an abortion in their lifetimes, despite barriers such as closed clinics, lack of insurance coverage, and various forms of stigma. Providing abortion care also has its barriers, due in large part to the anti-abortion activism that distorts this basic health service. But there are hidden contributors as well, which pose more insidious risks to abortion access: Aspiring doctors are learning harmful ways of discussing abortion and their medical schools are doing little to stop it.
To understand this, several colleagues and I analyzed interviews with 74 students in their final year of medical school who were planning to specialize in obstetrics and gynecology. We reported our findings in the journal Social Science & Medicine .. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277953618303708 .
During lengthy interviews, more than half of the students used the term “elective” to differentiate some abortions from others. This piqued our interest because “elective” has a very specific — and confusing — medical meaning. Within medicine, “elective” describes procedures that can be scheduled in the future, and differentiates them from procedures that must be performed immediately. “Elective” does not imply anything about the value or importance of the procedure; indeed, a lifesaving surgery should be called elective if it doesn’t need to be done today. Using this framework, the vast majority of abortions performed in the United States are appropriately categorized as elective.
Outside of medicine, however, “elective” means voluntary or optional.
Almost all of the students who used the term “elective” in their interviews misunderstood the difference, and used its non-medical meaning. They inappropriately juxtaposed “elective” and “medically necessary,” and used “elective” to describe abortions they considered to be sought for “social” or “convenience reasons.” The few who mentioned abortion after rape and incest were careful to clarify that those were unique social situations where abortions were not to be considered elective. In our interviews, students used “elective” to mark abortions sought for what they considered less-acceptable reasons or by what they considered less-acceptable people. Many students conveyed this bias by expressing that they would likely refuse to provide “elective” abortions in their future practice despite being willing to provide others.
Not a single student questioned their non-medical use of the term, and many described this use of “elective” being reinforced by their educational environments. Some noted how teachers ignored or glossed over the topic of elective abortion; others clarified that unless students went to certain clinics on certain days, they would only be exposed to what they were told were medically necessary abortions or, more commonly, no abortions at all.
One student related a story of seeing a patient transferred to an academic center from a freestanding abortion clinic for medical complications of pregnancy, but then having the patient be unable to receive care because no available faculty members would participate in an abortion that was considered elective.
Categorizing any abortion as unnecessary or unacceptable, especially when couched in co-opted medical jargon, is egregiously unprofessional. It places patients at risk of inferior treatment, and is also squarely at odds with standards set by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and other specialties that provide reproductive health care. But with some medical schools providing no formal education about abortion and the majority offering a single lecture or a non-required rotation, medical students’ hazy or incorrect knowledge about abortion care should not be a surprise.
In a vacuum, medical students get their knowledge from informal systems sometimes referred to as the hidden curriculum. As we describe in our report, misuse of the term “elective” exposes a hidden curriculum for abortion care that teaches students to make medically meaningless distinctions between abortions, to make inappropriate refusals of care, and to judge patients.
This hidden curriculum may make abortion more difficult to access, but it could also create a generation of physicians who are unprepared to even talk with their patients about abortion. At a time when physicians should be speaking out against threats to essential health care services, our research suggests that future obstetricians and gynecologists are ill-equipped to do so. As medical schools ignore the topic, medical trainees learn incorrect information through informal means, and ultimately abortion care becomes more stigmatized and more critically threatened.
Recent calls to train more abortion providers are timely, but they will founder without sustained institutional support. Medical schools must immediately set formal standards for how to discuss abortion with patients and with colleagues. They must then expand the role of reproductive health experts in developing required classroom and clinical experiences around abortion. And when students’ beliefs require they have no direct role in abortion care, schools must teach them how to mitigate any resulting delays or lapses in care for their patients, and to frame their refusals in a way that does not magnify abortion stigma.
Medical schools have a responsibility to ensure that future physicians appreciate the health impacts of safe and legal abortion care, regardless of political efforts to change its legality. Their future patients’ lives depend on it.
Benjamin E.Y. Smith, M.D., is a faculty member at the Fort Collins Family Medicine Residency at Poudre Valley Hospital.
Abortion ruling highlights the war against women in America. Time to fight back
"‘Operation Higher Court’: Inside the religious right’s efforts to wine and dine Supreme Court justices "The rightwing US supreme court has climate protection in its sights" "
Looking forward to women telling the GOP what they think of them.
Arwa Mahdawi
The post-Roe US will be a nightmare of digital authoritarianism where even Googling ‘abortion pill’ could be used against you
A demonstrator holds a sign outside the Arkansas state Capitol in Little Rock on Friday. Photograph: Andrew DeMillo/AP
Sat 25 Jun 2022 23.00 AEST Last modified on Sat 25 Jun 2022 23.01 AEST
The end of abortion rights in the US
Well, it finally happened. The fact that we all expected it, that we have spent the last few weeks waiting for this to happen, didn’t blunt the shock of it. On Friday the supreme court issued a decision in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization that overturned Roe v Wade .. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jun/24/roe-v-wade-overturned-abortion-summary-supreme-court . Six unelected supreme court justices stripped bodily autonomy away from tens of millions of women and ended nearly 50 years of legal abortion rights in the US.
There is a war on women going on in America. There is a war on trans people. There is a war on gay people. There is a war on people of colour. There is a war on democracy. And guess what? Only one side of the government is really fighting. Roe v Wade .. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/roe-v-wade .. wasn’t overturned just like that: it was the result of the Republicans spending decades consolidating power and working towards advancing their vision of America. Democrats need to stop their milquetoast simpering about “civility”, their obsession with taskforces and polite bipartisan agreements, and start properly fighting back.
The US government regulates women more than guns
Roe v Wade was overturned the day after the supreme court struck down .. https://www.theguardian.com/law/2022/jun/23/new-york-gun-ruling-supreme-court-reactions-democrats-republicans .. 100-year-old New York gun restrictions that made it tough to carry a concealed handgun outside the home. In the same week, then, the supreme court ruled that states don’t have the right to pass their own gun-control laws but do have the right to pass their own women-control laws. Time to get uteruses reclassified as assault rifles, I guess.
Opinion | What Alito Gets Wrong About the History of Abortion in America
"‘Operation Higher Court’: Inside the religious right’s efforts to wine and dine Supreme Court justices "The rightwing US supreme court has climate protection in its sights" -- Related: A Flood of Judicial Lobbying: Amicus Influence and Funding Transparency" ---
If it were possible to eavesdrop on conversations among women and some doctors in early America, you might overhear the phrase “bringing on the menses.” If a woman didn’t menstruate when expected, she was considered to be sick and action was required to bring her back to health. Women who had “a common cold” — a euphemism for “obstructed” menses — used a variety of methods, teas and concoctions to bring “their menses back.”
In other words, returning menstruation to its normal cycle was within the purview of a woman’s own self-health care and was not regulated by the state until after “quickening” — the moment during a pregnancy when a woman could feel a fetus kick and recognized a life “stirring” within her. Quickening occurred between the fourth and sixth month of pregnancy. Only after quickening was an induced miscarriage, an abortion, considered immoral and banned by law.
“An unbroken tradition of prohibiting abortion on pain of criminal punishment persisted from the earliest days of the common law until 1973,” Alito asserts in the draft opinion.
The logic that Alito uses in the draft opinion leans heavily on history — history that he gets egregiously wrong. Alito explicitly dismisses the distinction between ending a pregnancy before or after quickening, a distinction that my research has found was critical to the way American women and American physicians traditionally thought about pregnancy. In early America as in early modern England, abortion before “quickening” was legal under common law and widely accepted in practice.
Early European settlers of the Americas, enslaved Africans and Native Americans all had knowledge concerning menstrual regulation that women shared among themselves, with daughters, sisters and neighbors. European Americans could also look for guidance for treating “suppression of the menses” in a published health manual .. https://www.amazon.com/Abortion-America-Origins-Evolution-National/dp/0195026160 . Sitting on a shelf in their own homes might be a copy of the popular William Buchan’s Domestic Medicine .. https://wellcomecollection.org/works/fwp7hhg8 , first published in 1774 and republished many times into the mid-nineteenth century, The Married Lady’s Companion, or The Female Medical Repository, which all included similar advice for restoring menstruation through blood-letting, bathing or solutions composed of quinine, black hellebore, or juniper. The latter was the simplest for Americans to obtain since juniper bushes grew wild. Some indigenous women used the roots of black cohosh and enslaved Africans used snakeroot, cotton root and okra .. https://www.amazon.com/Laboring-Women-Reproduction-Slavery-American/dp/0812218736/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1KYIFIWRISQY8&keywords=jennifer+morgan+laboring+women&qid=1653155438&sprefix=jennifer+morgan%2Caps%2C96&sr=8-1 . By the mid-18th century, traveling salesmen in New England sold drugs explicitly to induce miscarriage. When these methods worked, the menses were “restored.”
The first laws in the United States governing abortion, passed by states in the 1820s and 1830s, banned the furnishing of drugs — “poison” — intended to induce a miscarriage of a “woman, then quick with child.” The first such law in Connecticut aimed to punish men who seduced women then, instead of marrying them when pregnancy developed, coerced them into using abortifacients .. https://www.nyhistory.org/blogs/teaching-womens-history-the-strange-and-sordid-tale . These first laws were essentially poison control measures intended to protect women from both abusive men and the sometimes-deadly herbs and medicines marketed to bring on their menses.
These first laws also referred only to inducing miscarriage after quickening. It is essential to recognize that these laws did not criminalize drugs used before quickening. The nation’s earliest laws assumed the existing common law right of women to regulate their menses — and to abort early pregnancies.
Instead, Alito begins his version of the history of abortion laws with the 1860s and 1870s, when states began to adopt laws that eliminated the legal significance of quickening and criminalized the ending of pregnancy at any stage. This second wave of laws was pushed by a small group of self-interested white, male physicians who were anxious about their status as both doctors and as elite American men.
The physicians’ anti-abortion movement was driven by a small group of highly educated white men who formed the American Medical Association in the 19th century. At the time, physicians did not enjoy the status and authority associated with the profession today. Rather, many mid-19th-century Americans, especially middle-class mothers, criticized these doctors for their treatment methods, which they saw as “violent” and excessive. These doctors also resented their many competitors, including midwives, homeopaths and other popular “irregular” practitioners. The leaders of the anti-abortion movement used the abortion issue to target these competing medical professionals. In winning these new statutes, the orthodox doctors forged a new alliance with the state that elevated them over all of the other practitioners as well as women themselves. Importantly, the new laws included an exception allowing doctors to perform abortions for medical reasons (“therapeutic abortions”) — in other words, they kept abortion legal when they performed the procedure. Alito skips over this loophole.
As important for motivating this movement of medical men was their hostility to women’s activism and the evident tendency of married, middle-class white women to limit the size of their families. Anti-abortion activists denounced the married white women who visited the offices of abortion providers, accusing them of favoring “fashion” and politics over motherhood. “The true wife,” wrote Dr. Horatio Storer .. https://catalog.nlm.nih.gov/discovery/fulldisplay?context=L&vid=01NLM_INST:01NLM_INST&search_scope=MyInstitution&tab=LibraryCatalog&lang=en&docid=alma991297673406676 , the medical leader of the anti-abortion movement, did not seek “undue power in public life . . . [or] privileges not her own.” This same Harvard doctor and his AMA colleagues also vigorously resisted the entry of women into the medical profession.
The doctors also drummed up alarm over changing national demographics. The white, native-born Yankee class, Storer and his colleagues argued, would soon be out-populated by immigrants thanks to the abortion practices of middle-class white women. “Aliens,” Chinese, and most especially Catholics, Storer warned, would settle the West if the women of his own class failed to produce larger families.
---------- OUCH! The Texas Taliban wing of the Republican Party [...] [INSERT: Now consider the Republicans in Texas. They too are afraid of democracy. From Sen. Ted Cruz to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, they sought to overturn the presidential election, while the party leaders echo Donald Trump’s Big Lie that the election was stolen. p - Worried that Republicans are in danger of becoming a minority in the state, ------ [INSERT: Replacement theory. Potential Dem voters. Children of color already make up the majority of kids in many US states https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=168915885 Mainstream GOP fascism [...] Similarly, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick of Texas has declared .. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/09/17/dan-patrick-great-replacement-theory/?itid=lk_inline_manual_26 .. that Democrats would effect a “silent revolution” by “allowing” an “invasion” of migrants. Patrick carefully couched this as a warning about “millions of voters” set to impose their will on the current population, and we’ve heard talk about imported voters from other Republicans .. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/04/20/what-anglo-saxon-traditions-controversy-says-about-our-current-moment/?itid=lk_inline_manual_26 , including Rep. Scott Perry of Pennsylvania and Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin. P - Or take J.D. Vance, the GOP Senate nominee from Ohio. He recently claimed .. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1iRpVoJmUuJQChaWqjslQhxk93K_aJEIAHXZezr0snzg/edit .. that President Biden’s “open border” will ensure “more Democrat voters pouring into this country.” P - But once again, for the same reasons that Carlson and Stefanik cannot be permitted to get away with this scam of feigning racial neutrality, none of these Republicans can pretend to be warning only of electoral consequences. P - This sort of trickery works on still another level: It recasts racist conspiracy theorizing in a more acceptable form. As Gorski puts it, the talk about new voters is really a “fig leaf to hide white supremacy.” P - “By wrapping up ‘great replacement theory’ in concerns about democracy, they’re injecting the theory into our public conversation,” Gorski told me, noting that this moves it “from the white supremacist fringes into the conservative mainstream.” https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=168906671] ------ Gov. Greg Abbott and the Republican state legislature just pushed through election suppression measures to make it harder for workers, minorities, seniors, young people and the disabled to vote, harder for civic groups to assist people in voting, easier for partisans to intimidate voters, and opened the way for the partisan legislature to overturn election results they don’t like. p - Republicans prey, as well, on racial and religious prejudices. Their party chairman, Allen West, is a former Florida congressman who described Barack Obama as “Islamist,” charging that he was “purposefully enabling the Islamist cause.” When the Supreme Court tossed Trump’s baseless challenge to the election, West suggested that the South should rise again and secede: “that law-abiding states should bound together and form a union of states that will abide by the constitution.” https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=169191507] ----------
Yet Alito again dismisses the historical record, saying that the hostility to immigrants and women expressed by Storer were merely the words of “one prominent opponent.” But Storer’s statements and actions were the underlying force that drove the passage of the laws that criminalized abortions; state and local medical societies used his essays, data, memorials and letters to convince state legislatures and governors of the necessity of making abortion at all stages of pregnancy a crime. Storer’s anti-immigrant and racist views — an early version of “replacement theory” — were a prime driver of the anti-abortion movement that Alito claims as the true American tradition.
It’s important to understand that even though Storer’s views became law, that didn’t mean they were widely embraced. Although quickening no longer mattered according to the new laws, my research revealed that the general public still believed it did. In my book on the history of abortion, I quote Dr. Joseph Taber Johnson, a prominent physician who taught obstetrics in Washington, D.C, who wrote in 1895 that, “Many otherwise good and exemplary women” thought that “prior to quickening it is no more harm to cause the evacuation of the contents of their wombs than it is that of their bladders or their bowels.” Although medical men like Johnson didn’t approve of their patients’ abortion practices, the medical profession was deeply involved in providing abortions in this period, either performing the procedure themselves or giving their patients referrals to someone else who did.
That fact, true over the entire century of criminalized abortion, reveals that the official pronouncements denouncing abortion made by medical leaders obscured genuine and significant differences in thought and practice within the medical profession.The claims to moral superiority made by medical leaders and their societies masked a reality in which abortion in early pregnancy was not only commonplace but widely regarded as morally acceptable.
Over time, since criminalizing abortion did not stop it, police and prosecutors developed a system for enforcing the laws that centered on interrogating women who had abortions, capturing them, along with the provider and any assistants, during raids of abortion offices and forcing them to testify in public courtrooms. Coercive gynecological examinations were sometimes part of the police gathering of evidence to prosecute abortion providers. Although we only know of a handful of cases where women who had abortions were prosecuted or jailed (there could be hundreds or thousands more that left no record), women were thoroughly shamed and punished through these humiliating and invasive methods of investigation. In the 1900s, boyfriends involved in abortions that resulted in the death of their “sweetheart” were jailed for months and prosecuted.
The end result was that criminalizing abortion pushed it underground where regulating safety was virtually impossible and many women could not find anyone to help them or could not afford it. Many aborted their pregnancies themselves, using herbs, Clorox, or turpentine or turned to instruments, like crochet hooks, orange sticks, pencils, or a chicken feather, which they poked into the cervix to induce a miscarriage. A small number of white women continued to be able to obtain rare, legal “therapeutic” abortions in hospitals, as did those who had the good fortune to be part of a medical family. But most women, across race, class and religion, had to go to underground providers, some of whom were excellent and safe while others were inept. Thousands went to hospital emergency rooms every year bleeding, injured and sometimes feverish and infected. Some of them died, approximately four times as many Black and Latina women as white women. Chicago’s Cook County Hospital had an entire ward dedicated to septic abortion cases. That ward closed after 1973.
The United States has already experienced a century of criminalized abortion .. https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520387416/when-abortion-was-a-crime : The results of those 19th-century laws cited by Alito produced a public health disaster that killed Black, brown and low-income women in disproportionate numbers, raised maternal mortality and injured millions of women. If abortion is criminalized once again in the 21st century, history tells us what we can expect — whether or not the Supreme Court chooses to take that history into consideration.
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