Doctor Informed State of 10-Year-Old Girl’s Abortion
A document obtained by The New York Times shows that the Indiana obstetrician reported the child’s abortion to the state.
Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Ava Sasani

A lawyer for the Indiana obstetrician who has drawn national attention for providing abortion care to a 10-year-old rape victim said on Thursday that the doctor had taken “every appropriate and proper action” in the case — including filing necessary forms to report the abortion with state authorities, contrary to the assertions of Indiana’s attorney general.

The case of the rape victim, who crossed state lines from Ohio to get an abortion in Indianapolis, has become a hot-button issue in the nation’s roiling abortion debate. Many on the right — including the Ohio attorney general — initially doubted the veracity of the story when it was shared by Dr. Caitlin Bernard, the Indiana obstetrician. The story was confirmed after the arrest of the man accused of raping the girl. Yet Dr. Bernard remained under scrutiny.

The Indiana attorney general, Todd Rokita, told Fox News on Wednesday that he intended to investigate Dr. Bernard, and suggested she failed to file required reports.

“We’re gathering the information, we’re gathering the evidence as we speak, and we’re going to fight this to the end, including looking at her licensure if she failed to report,” Mr. Rokita said in an interview, in which he assailed Dr. Bernard, who practices in Indianapolis, as an “abortion activist acting as a doctor, with a history of failing to report.”

But a document obtained by The New York Times appears to contradict Mr. Rokita’s assertion. The document, a “Terminated Pregnancy Report” filed with the Indiana Department of Health and the Department of Child Services, states that Dr. Bernard provided abortion medication — a two-pill combination that can be taken at home or in any location and is authorized for use in the first 10 weeks of pregnancy — to a 10-year-old patient on June 30. The report was dated July 2, which puts it within ...

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/14/us/1 ... diana.html

Reading between the lines, the AG is determined to shut down someone who is willing to provide abortion services to anyone (including a ten year old rape victim).

“If a ten-year-old became pregnant as a result of rape and it was threatening her life, then that’s not an abortion. So, it would not fall under any abortion restriction in our nation.”

- anti-abortion activist Catherine Glenn Foster, president and CEO of Americans United for Life

It doesn't stop with abortion ....

Here’s how Roe v. Wade overturn is impacting other medical care in U.S.
By Lindsey Tanner

A sexual assault survivor chooses sterilization so that if she is ever attacked again, she won’t be forced to give birth to a rapist’s baby. An obstetrician delays inducing a miscarriage until a woman with severe pregnancy complications seems “sick enough.” A lupus patient must stop taking medication that controls her illness because it can also cause miscarriages.


Abortion restrictions in a number of states and the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade are having profound repercussions in reproductive medicine as well as in other areas of medical care.

“For physicians and patients alike, this is a frightening and fraught time, with new, unprecedented concerns about data privacy, access to contraception, and even when to begin lifesaving care,” said Dr. Jack Resneck, president of the American Medical Association.

Even in medical emergencies, doctors are sometimes declining immediate treatment. In the past week, an Ohio abortion clinic received calls from two women with ectopic pregnancies — when an embryo grows outside the uterus and can’t be saved — who said their doctors wouldn’t treat them. Ectopic pregnancies often become life-threatening emergencies and abortion clinics aren’t set up to treat them.

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It’s just one example of “the horrible downstream effects of criminalizing abortion care,” said Dr. Catherine Romanos, who works at the Dayton clinic.

MEDICAL DILEMMAS

Dr. Jessian Munoz, an OB-GYN in San Antonio, Texas, who treats high-risk pregnancies, said medical decisions used to be clear cut.

“It was like, the mom’s life is in danger, we must evacuate the uterus by whatever means that may be,” he said. “Whether it’s surgical or medical _ that’s the treatment.”

Now, he said, doctors whose patients develop pregnancy complications are struggling to determine whether a woman is “sick enough” to ...

https://globalnews.ca/news/8995261/roe- ... re-in-u-s/

"If the advocates of forced birth were truly confident in their beliefs, they would be proud of what happened to this girl: The law worked exactly as intended. If they didn’t want to force children to give birth, then they really shouldn’t support a law that all but guarantees it will happen."

Ohio's 10-year-old victim forced Republicans to look at their own cruelty. They blinked.
The right’s initial skepticism about the Ohio case was bad. The quest to prove the story still doesn’t mean what it clearly means is pure moral bankruptcy.
https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/ohios-10-year-old-rape-victim-reveals-republican-abortion-law-conseque-rcna38449

Across the U.S., Republicans are passing laws to stop doctors from providing abortions. Those laws may also be scaring health workers out of providing care for miscarriages.

How Abortion Bans are affecting miscarriage care

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/20/podc ... tment.html

Incoming medical students walk out at University of Michigan’s white coat ceremony as the keynote speaker is openly anti-abortion



While I'm glad to see that it wasn't just students who walked out it's disappointing to see just how many stayed seated.

"Threats against abortion providers are hardly new. But the overturning of Roe has created a frightening new legal landscape for doctors."

An Indiana Doctor Speaks Out on Abortion, and Pays a Price
Dr. Caitlin Bernard, who provided an abortion to a 10-year-old, says doctors shouldn’t be silent. But she finds herself at the center of a post-Roe clash shaking the medical community.
By Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Ava Sasani

Three weeks before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Dr. Caitlin Bernard, an Indianapolis obstetrician-gynecologist, donned her white lab coat, put her infant daughter into a front-pack baby carrier and joined a few colleagues who marched to the State Capitol, hoping to deliver a letter to Gov. Eric Holcomb.

Signed by hundreds of health professionals, the letter implored Mr. Holcomb, a Republican, not to convene a special legislative session to further restrict abortions. It contained a pointed political message: “Abortion bans are not popular in our state.”

Dr. Bernard, who catapulted into the national spotlight for providing an abortion to a 10-year-old rape victim last month, delivers babies and provides contraceptive care, pap smears and other routine obstetric and gynecological care. She is also one of a small number of doctors in her state with specific training in ...

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/28/us/p ... -ohio.html

Maybe a law that denies ob-gyn services to Republicans would make the evangelical loonies happy.

Is #89 binding?

Don't know

For once I'm speechless



More here including a vid of him saying that

https://imgur.com/gallery/3xEcsqP

His Popeness just babbled a bunch of meaningless apologies to Native Canadians.

Didn't expect anything else. After all, when he was in Argentina he actively moved priests around the country to keep them away from the authorities. And the church has spent millions of dollars lobbying against law changes that would make it easier for people who were subject to abuse as children to report things. So why would he do anything other than make polite noises that might be taken as a "first step".

It isn't working around here.

The great GOP abortion backpedal: Republicans slowly realize they live in a partisan bubble
Falling poll numbers are a shock to the GOP: Who knew that Americans would be so fond of the freedom to have sex
AMANDA MARCOTTE

The Republican Party line on abortion has long been standard: The value of a fertilized egg far outweighs the value of a living, breathing woman. Is this unwanted pregnancy interfering with your education plans, your ability to leave an abusive relationship, or threatening to kill you? Too bad! So deeply do Republicans value that mindless embryo that your entire life must be upended — or even ended — to preserve that precious ball of cells. But while Republicans may sacrifice the lives and futures of women to preserve embryonic life, when it comes to their own political ambitions, the calculus suddenly changes.

As reporter Areeba Shah detailed for Salon Wednesday, a whole bunch of Republicans are suddenly discovering their "deeply felt" love of embryonic life isn't quite so deep as their desire to win their elections come November. GOP campaign websites are being scrubbed of language affirming a candidate's wish to force 10-year-old rape victims to give birth. Accusations that the over 800,000 abortion patients a year are guilty of "genocide" are being shoved down the memory hole. Candidates, like Peter Thiel-boosted Senate hopeful Blake Masters, once bragged about how they'd ban abortion before the pregnancy test even registers positive. Now Masters is pretending his interest is limited to "very late-term and partial-birth abortion" only.

It's all lies, of course.

Republican-controlled state legislatures are stampeding towards ever more draconian abortion bans, ones that are so fulsome that they prevent miscarrying women from getting treatment, force those with ectopic pregnancies to lose ovaries, and keep postmenopausal patients from getting basic gynecological care. But in order to enact a reign of terror over anyone with a uterus, first Republicans must get elected. And, as they're increasingly starting to realize, most voters aren't that keen on politicians who agree with ...

https://www.salon.com/2022/09/01/the-gr ... an-bubble/

"The Dog that Caught the Car" is a Fun Metaphor but the GOP Is Realizing How That Ends
Let's just say that one would not want to be the dog.
Charles P. Pierce

When I was young, we owned a beagle that was well-nigh indestructible. He once took a big bite out of a porcupine and instantly regretted it. He once, somehow, broke his tail; he came home one evening, his tail was shaped like an “S” curve at Le Mans. He fought the skunks, and the skunks won. And one day he took off after a car and got rolled under one of the front wheels, breaking one of his back legs. We took him to the vet and got him put in a cast. For two months, he clunked around the house like Captain Ahab. He survived and lived to lose more fights with more skunks until he died of extreme old age one day when I was away at college.

My point is that the whole “dog catches the car” business that’s had itself a workout since the carefully engineered conservative Supreme Court majority handed down its decision reversing Roe v. Wade is a metaphor that has been employed incompletely. In fact, as my late beagle learned, dogs catch cars all the time. And it never ends well for the dog. In our current circumstances—and in very many ways—the Republican Party is the dog. (And, may I add, its breakfast.) From Politico (via Yahoo News):

One after the other, Republican nominees in top Senate battlegrounds have softened, backpedaled and sought to clarify their abortion positions after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade. Another is that male candidates have begun putting their wives in front of the camera to speak directly to voters in new television ads. Those ads, along with public and internal polling data, suggest that the GOP’s struggle to attract women voters may turn out to be the biggest obstacle standing between the party and a potential Senate majority in 2023.

A Wall Street Journal poll released Thursday showed that abortion was the single issue most likely to drive respondents to vote this fall, above inflation. And 52 percent of white suburban women say they would support a Democratic candidate in the election, the poll found, while only 40 percent said they would vote for the Republican. “I’m convinced that, based on numbers we have, Republicans have to make some kind of leap on the abortion issue,” said Chuck Coughlin, an Arizona-based GOP strategist. “Because they’re getting killed among women.”

It never ends well for the dog.

https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/p ... dobbs-roe/

The never think about this sort of thing until it affects them personally ....

REALITY BITES: Pro-life woman with endangered pregnancy discovers deadly flaws in Texas law
Ty Ross

Kailee DeSpain, a self-proclaimed “quintessential pro-lifer,” has suddenly changed her stance on the Texas abortion law after her own life was endangered. Faced with a high-risk pregnancy, and a most likely unviable fetus, the 29-year-old Texan had to travel across state lines after being told she could not get a legal abortion in the state.

Two months after one of the nation’s most restrictive abortion bans went into effect – Texas’ SB 8 – DeSpain learned while moving into her second trimester that “The fetus had severe genetic heart and brain defects that made it unlikely to survive after birth.” Doctors told DeSpain she was “at high risk for severe pregnancy complications, including blood clots, preeclampsia, and cancer,” CNN reported.

Though the Lone Star State’s ban allows exceptions to save the mother’s life, the circumstances of what exactly is required to prove a life-threatening situation is up to interpretation. The guidelines are so vague that physicians have found themselves at a crossroads between Texas law and their oath.

Faced with out-of-pocket costs and travel expenses – not to mention the potential health risks when carrying a pregnancy that could be detrimental to both the mother’s and the baby’s mortality – DeSpain is one of many coming to the realization that pro-life doesn’t fit in the box they’ve placed it in, and that the overturning of Roe v. Wade is about so much more than the constitutional right to abortion.

She and her husband, Cade, had to ...

https://occupydemocrats.com/2022/09/10/ ... texas-law/