The Abortion Red Flag Emporium

How to think critically about a pro-abortion media zeitgeist

Pro-abortion activists seem to treat abortion as if it were literally the single most important thing in the entire world. It is hard to overstate how much emphasis and importance they have placed on the right to “terminate” a “pregnancy,” a right they have placed as paramount to all others to the point that they are more or less explicitly equating restrictions on abortion to slavery:

With that in mind, we should not be surprised when they take some extreme and even arguably unethical steps to preserve the right to an abortion, up to and including lying about it. That’s what may very well have happened over the past week with a sensational story from the Indianapolis Star that spread around the Internet like wildfire, one about a very young girl in Ohio who was reportedly raped and impregnated and subsequently needed an abortion:

On Monday three days after the Supreme Court issued its groundbreaking decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, Dr. Caitlin Bernard, an Indianapolis obstetrician-gynecologist, took a call from a colleague, a child abuse doctor in Ohio.

Hours after the Supreme Court action, the Buckeye state had outlawed any abortion after six weeks. Now this doctor had a 10-year-old patient in the office who was six weeks and three days pregnant.

Could Bernard help?

Indiana lawmakers are poised to further restrict or ban abortion in mere weeks. The Indiana General Assembly will convene in a special session July 25 when it will discuss restrictions to abortion policy along with inflation relief.

But for now, the procedure still is legal in Indiana. And so the girl soon was on her way to Indiana to Bernard's care.

Even with a cursory first look at this report, there are so many red flags here that it feels like a meeting of the Communist Youth League. And the flags have only grown in number and size in the week or so since the story was released.

Let’s go over them one by one:

• The first big issue is timing. This sensational, enraging, horrifying, difficult, catalyzing, galvanizing story about abortion just happened to drop mere days after the Supreme Court scuttled a 50-year-old abortion law. That’s not dispositive, but it’s wholly suspicious. How often do you hear of 10-year-old rape victims getting pregnant? I’m not saying it never happens—most assuredly it does—but it seems comparatively rare, insofar as news reports of it seem to be very few and far between. A quick Google search shows maybe fewer than half a dozen well-publicized instances over maybe the last decade or so. And yet here’s a story that just happens to land on an abortion doctor’s desk like 72 hours after Roe goes down, and then it lands on an editor’s desk a few days later. That’s incredible.

• There appears to have been absolutely no attempt on the part of the Indianapolis Star’s reporters, Shari Rudavsky and Rachel Fradette, to confirm anything beyond the surface-level story that Dr. Caitlan Bernard told them. That’s a big red flag. Reporters—good, competent reporters, anyway—are voracious for facts. They devour them like stoners devour potato chips. If they get a scoop they tend to want to know everything about it, from every angle. If I were covering this story I’d want to know: Do we know the identity of the rapist who impregnated this 10-year-old girl? Where does he live? Has he been reported to police? Is there an investigation ongoing? What has it found? Did either the Ohio doctor or Dr. Bernard fulfill their duties as mandatory child abuse reporters? What happened to the girl after the abortion? Did she return to the circumstances that got her into this horrifying predicament in the first place? Did she return to her abuser? Maybe the reporters asked these questions; if so they didn’t inform their readers. Maybe Dr. Bernard gave weird, shifty, evasive answers to their questions; but, again, readers do not know if she did or not. Why the opacity?

• There also appears to have been no attempt on the part of upper management to verify this story’s particulars. Glenn Kessler, the “fact checker” at the Washington Post, asked everyone involved about the sourcing of the story, and he basically got told to go jump in a lake:

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, 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.”

So both the reporter and the publisher and the Indy Star’s executive editor provided absolutely no clarifying information or details about a bombshell sensational claim that has now been cited by the President of the United States. That’s wild. Very, very big red flag. (It’s worth noting that Bro Krift is technically correct here—the “facts and sourcing” of this story are, indeed, “clear.” They’re just scant and opaque, is the problem.)

• The abortion doctor—who is herself a staunch pro-abortion advocate who has engaged in abortion litigation in the past—is also refusing to offer any more details. Asked by Kessler for more information, she flat-out stonewalled him:

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.

She gave nearly identical answers to the Daily Caller and LifeSiteNews. Note that even her lack of clarification itself lacks clarification: She did not explain her unwillingness to comment by arguing that, say, she is prohibited from sharing even the slightest identifying detail of one of her patients (which would be kind of moot at this point, but oh well), or that she does not want to endanger an already traumatized young girl, or that she does not want to interfere with an ongoing police investigation. Nothing. Literally: “I don’t have any information to share.” Why not?

• Give Kessler some credit, he did something resembling due diligence here: Told by Ohio authorities that the case would be dealt with at the local level, Kessler contacted “child services agencies in some of Ohio’s most populous cities, including Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati, Dayton and Toledo.” But “none of the officials we reached were aware of such a case in their areas.” Okay, so, we have a publisher, an editor, a reporter and a star source who are at the very least extremely unwilling to offer any clarifying details about a major story, and meanwhile no child protective authorities thus far contacted have heard of any such local crime (and presumably they haven’t heard of it anywhere else, either, because if so they’d likely have pointed Kessler to it). So nobody involved in publicizing this story can offer any more information about it, and the people most poised to have the most information about it also know nothing about it.

Does this seem like a credible story to you? It does not, at least not now. As Kessler noted, if a rapist is charged with this crime, the story “finally would have more solid grounding.” If someone in the know—the abortion doctor, the reporter, a child protective agency, anyone—is able to shine more light on this, then that too would offer more “solid grounding.”

Beyond that, we’re left with just a sea of red flags: A committed pro-abortion activists has made a claim that she is refusing to expand upon; everyone involved in the story is refusing to expand upon it; apparently nobody’s heard of even the slightest detail to confirm even an iota of the story. Will that change? Maybe so. In the meantime you’d be entirely justified in considering this story to be likely false.