Nothing is ever private with Lena Dunham. Remember the 2014 memoir in which Lena described molesting her little sister? Remember how she described being raped at Oberlin College by a Republican, except that it never actually happened? Because she inhabits a narcissistic bubble in which her own feelings and experiences (real or imaginary) are the only thing that matter, Dunham’s self-centered confessional mode of writing makes everything about her. Nothing can be perceived objectively, because what about me? So when her chronic gynecological problems led her to get a hysterectomy in December 2017, this became the subject of a 2,400-word article in Vogue, as if it were imperative to share this experience with her “fans” (whoever they may be). And now this:
Filmmaker Lena Dunham — who once said she has never had an abortion but wishes she had — says the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to overrule Roe v. Wade was one of the “darkest days” she has experienced in her life. “I’m terrified,” Dunham told Yahoo! Entertainment of the Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization ruling. “I grew up with a mother who was part of the Downtown Women’s Action Coalition that went and held hands around abortion clinics to make sure that women could enter and exit safely without being harassed by protesters.”
“I was also raised to say ‘anti-choice’ and not ‘pro-life’ for people who advocate those views,” the 7 Days in Hell actress added, before claiming that pro-life Americans are “anti-the livelihood of people with female reproductive organs.”
Dunham went on to bizarrely refer to women as “people who are assigned female at birth,” stating, “when people who are assigned female at birth don’t have bodily autonomy, we don’t have a free society.”
“So those are my beliefs, and I think that it’s my job and all of our jobs to do everything that we can to make abortion accessible and affordable,” she added.
Dunham also implored Americans to “make sure that people who are in these states that are locking down are going to have support of people who are in states where there is more freedom to get where they need to go and make the choices to live free lives.”
“My life exists because I’ve been allowed to have bodily autonomy,” Dunham affirmed. “My ability to have and pay for a hysterectomy allowed me autonomy because I no longer lived in chronic pain.”
“I think that [June 24] was probably one of the darkest days that I’ve experienced in my life in terms of my terror around what’s happening in this country,” the actress added.
Dunham is just one of many celebrities having a public meltdown over the idea that women may not be able to as easily kill their unborn children in a post-Roe America.
In 2016, Dunham proclaimed that she has never had an abortion but wishes she had, because she believes killing one’s own unborn child is a sign of “bravery” and “self-knowledge.”
Do you believe in curses? Do you believe that, by their actions, people may draw down the wrath of Almighty God upon themselves? Because I was raised up in Bible-believing tradition, where it was emphasized that we were “sinners in the hands of angry God,” as Jonathan Edwards famously phrased it, and that only by God’s mercy could any of us hope for anything good in this life, or the hereafter.
God hates sin, and we are all guilty of it, and therefore those who defy God invite their own destruction. Or so I was raised to believe, and when I contemplate the miserable life of Lena Dunham, I’m thankful for all those Bible-thumping sermons I heard as a child. Otherwise . . .
One of the things about political tribalism is that it encourages participants to think of politics as a fight for survival — Us and Them — in which there are no rules. The Democratic Party has made identity politics part of their core belief system, which interwoven with the strategic idea that demographic trends (particularly the growth of non-white minority populations) is the key to their obtaining uncontested political hegemony. This explains, among other things, why Donald Trump’s desire to enforce U.S. immigration law was regarded by Democrats as a species of “hate,” because they view unrestricted immigration as a means of rapidly growing the Hispanic which, in turn, they expect will ultimately provide Democrats with an insuperable electoral majority. This is not a “conspiracy theory”; it’s a synopsis of what has happened to California over the past 30 years, for example.
Democrats view illegal aliens as part of their party’s constituency, because of what we may dub The Future Democratic Voters Project, and as a consequence, will do anything necessary to prevent these law-breaking foreigners from being deported or otherwise inconvenienced. This is why, for example, Joe Biden has insisted that Border Patrol agents must be punished despite the fact that an investigation cleared them of wrongdoing — it’s a symbolic gesture of anti-Trump solidarity. And it’s also a major contributing factor to Trump Derangement Syndrome quite generally. Of all the things Trump did, what was really unforgivable from a Democratic (and establishment GOP) point of view was that he threatened to break up the Bipartisan Open Borders Consensus of which the late John McCain was a leader. Meanwhile, in Ohio . . .
WATCH: The mother of the Ohio 10/y rape victim tells Telemundo’s @MariaVargasPion that the child “is fine”, and “everything they say about (Gerson Flores) is a lie.” pic.twitter.com/Vtpyn404g7
This appears to confirm my thesis of a domestic situation wherein the confessed rapist is also the paramour of the victim’s mother (other familial relation is possible but less likely). Unfortunately, I saw many such cases while working as a court interpreter.
Other questions: what was the time gap between the initial reporting of the rape and the filing of criminal charges? Why did the referring abortion provider not report the rape to authorities? Was the child forced to live with her rapist in furtherance of an abortion narrative?
Journalists asking the important questions? Wow, what a concept!
Bonilla’s belief that (a) the mother of the girl is also an illegal alien, (b) the child rapist Gershon Fuentes is the family’s primary breadwinner, and therefore (c) the mother didn’t want Fuentes arrested for raping the girl, because (d) the whole family might get deported back to the sh**hole country they came from — probably explains a lot about how this story played out. The Indiana abortionist Dr. Caitlin Bernard apparently violated patient privacy laws by telling the media about this case, which she spun as proving why Ohio’s “extreme” abortion law was wrong. However, Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost says the law has a “medical emergency” provision that would have permitted the girl to get an abortion (presumably because she is so young that pregnancy and childbirth would be traumatic). Is it possible that the girl was referred to an out-of-state clinic because Dr. Bernard was known to be “cooperative” in such situations? According to Fox News, in her paperwork on the case, Dr. Bernard claimed that the 10-year-old had been impregnated by another minor, i.e., she wasn’t really a victim of rape, so no criminal investigation, please? Selling this tale as a moral defense of unlimited abortion “rights” would have been more complicated if all the facts of the case were known, so in talking to reporters Dr. Bernard didn’t mention anything that would lead readers to suspect that the “Ohio girl” was actually a Mexican girl, probably in the country illegally, who was raped by her mother’s 27-year-old illegal alien boyfriend from Guatemala.
This explains the vagueness of the original story, which caused many of us to suspect it was a hoax: If a 10-year-old girl is pregnant, a crime has been committed, but the story said nothing about whether the child rapist had been arrested. And then, eventually, we learned that it was not until Tuesday — the day after PJM’s Megan Fox and Ohio Attorney General Yost appeared on Fox News — that cops arrested the rapist:
A detective testified Wednesday at an initial court appearance for the 27-year-old suspect that Columbus police learned about the girl’s pregnancy after her mother alerted Franklin County Children Services on June 22, The Columbus Dispatch reported.
Look at the calendar: Police were informed on Wednesday, June 22, but it was not until Tuesday, July 12, nearly three weeks later, that Fuentes was arrested. This raises more questions, including whether it was coincidental that Fuentes wasn’t arrested until afterMegan Fox and Dave Yost went on Fox News to raise hell about this story.
Despite everything going on here — the one-source story based on the word of an Indiana abortionist, the delay in arresting the perpetrator, the role of Biden’s open-border policy in enabling this criminal atrocity — still the media continue to act as if it’s a “gotcha” for Republicans:
All of these takes are so wrong that one supposes there must be a central campaign to organize this deliberate wrongness. Are Republicans “shocked a 10-year-old can get pregnant,” as NBC News claims? As if pregnant 10-year-olds are so ordinary — so commonplace — that we should not be shocked? Oh, by the way, while I’m at it, I should mention that this girl just turned 10, so it’s likely that her mother’s Guatemalan boyfriend got her pregnant when she was only nine, and may have been abusing the girl for who knows how long before the pregnancy occurred. And, as I said in my first post on this subject (“A Story Too Good to Check?” July 4), I actually did some research:
The extreme youth of the alleged victim is what made the headline so shocking, and I actually checked the National Institutes of Health to make sure I wasn’t alone in finding this highly unusual. The median age of menarche (i.e., onset of menstruation, generally taken as meaning when a female becomes physically capable of pregnancy) in the United States is 11.9, about three months earlier than in the 1990s. About 10% of females reach menarche by age 10. Precocious puberty is slightly correlated with earlier sexual activity — the median age of first intercourse is 15.4 for girls reaching menache by age 10, compared to 16.6 for girls reaching menarche at age 14 or older. In general, blacks and Hispanics reach menarche earlier than white girls, but the differences are not dramatic.
Still, a 10-year-old girl getting pregnant is rare enough in the United States that I had difficulty finding any statistical data on the phenomenon. When you’re talking about something with far less than a 1% probability, good luck finding reliable data.
* March 2009: A 10-year-old Haitian girl in Lantana, Florida, became pregnant after a 33-year-old man [Fede Datilus] raped her when she was 9. Her father learned of her pregnancy only when he took her to the clinic when she suffered labor contractions on March 18, 2009. The same day, she gave birth naturally to a full-term boy. . . . She confided that she had been afraid that she and her father would be deported to Haiti — a threat the rapist had used against her. Datilus was sentenced to life imprisonment for raping a minor under 12 years, to which 5 years for impregnating her was added.
* April 2008: Isabel Chasearez’s 10-year-old daughter, from St. Anthony, Idaho, gave birth by cesarean section to a girl weighing approximately 6 lb (2.7 kg) at Madison Memorial Hospital in Rexburg after her mother’s boyfriend [Guadalupe Gutierrez-Juarez] raped her. The man, an undocumented immigrant from Mexico, was jailed on one felony count of rape with impregnation; Chasearez was jailed as well for failing to provide proper prenatal care. Juarez was sentenced to 5 years to life.
* April 2006: A young girl in Abbeville, South Carolina, gave birth by cesarean section. Her 26-year-old stepfather, William Edward Ronca, raped her. The baby was placed up for adoption. Ronca admitted to having molested the girl over a two-year period and was sentenced to 25 years in prison and is currently incarcerated in the Allendale Correctional Institution.
Three times in more than 20 years. If you went all the way back to 1969 (i.e, more than 50 years), you’d only add five more cases to the list.
Pregnant 10-year-olds are very, very rare in the United States, but somewhat more common in Latin America and, while it would obviously be unfair to impugn the culture of an entire continent based on a relative handful of cases, a few examples will perhaps suffice to make the point:
BOLIVIA, 2010 — A 10-year-old girl from El Torno gave birth by cesarean section to a girl weighing 2.3 kg (5.1 lb) at the Instituto Maternológico Percy Boland in Santa Cruz de la Sierra. Three of the girl’s brothers raped her. They were 15, 17, and 19. The youngest one was her child’s biological father.
BRAZIL, 2012 — In late December 2011, Antônio Lisboa Filho, age 28, discovered that his ten-and-a-half-year-old daughter, whom he had been raping regularly since she was eight, was 4 months pregnant. He fled from Coroatá, Maranhão with his wife Maria Alves Conceição and their other children, abandoning the girl with her maternal grandmother, Francisca Maria Conceição. Conceição alerted authorities of the rape and the parents’ subsequent escape. As the pregnancy had advanced past the legal cut-off date for abortions, the girl delivered the baby via cesarean section in early May 2012, a month before term. Police also suspected the man of raping the girl’s 8-year-old sister.
PERU, 2012 — Laura Marina Villanueva’s older sister’s 45-year-old companion, Gaudencio Castañeda Pulido, a former soldier and her neighbor, raped the girl three times, just before her birthday on June 24; he had previously impregnated the girl’s then-15-year-old sister. Her pregnancy was discovered in late September, at 19 weeks, by chance after she was admitted for a snake bite. Castañeda Pulido went on the run when the discovery was reported in the media and continued threatening to kill the girl and her mother, Nidia Villanueva Tolentino. On January 24, 2012, she delivered a 2.21 kilograms (4.9 lb) boy by cesarean section, whom she named Justin, after singer Justin Bieber. Castañeda Pulido was sentenced to 35 years in jail.
PARAGUAY, 2015 — The 10-year-old girl was brought to an Asunción hospital by her mother, who believed that she had a tumor, where doctors discovered that she was five months pregnant and alerted authorities. They told the mother that her daughter’s life was at risk and she requested permission from the Paraguayan government for an abortion, which was denied. The case caused debate nationally and abroad about Paraguay’s strict anti-abortion laws. The stepfather fled, but was arrested in Boquerón, Caazapá Department. He denied paternity but a DNA test came out positive. Mainumby’s mother had denounced Benítez for sexual abuse of her daughter four times in the previous year, yet authorities never intervened. After the pregnancy’s discovery, she was herself arrested and charged with negligence and sexual abuse of a child, and sentenced to two months in prison for the former.
This list could be extended quite a bit, because 10-year-old girls in Latin America have given birth to more than 20 babies since 2004. As I say, one can’t condemn an entire continent’s population based on a few extreme cases, but my point is that when I saw a story about a pregnant 10-year-old in Ohio, I assumed either (a) the story was phony or (b) this case involved immigrants, probably from Latin America.
So, what was presented by the media as a morality tale about the importance of abortion “rights” turns out to be, instead, a story about social problems caused by illegal immigration. Ace of Spades offers some enlightened legal commentary:
Question: If this mother had some kind of deal permitting this man sexual access to her nine year old child, and then couldn’t decide if she wanted to abort his baby or not… is this really the kind of thing we have to contort ourselves writing exceptions and corner-cases in the law to cover?
Does the law have to take into consideration every single monstrous perversion the human mind can contemplate?
And note that the Attorney General already stated he believes that this was all a lie from the start — that Ohio’s abortion law contains an “emergency medical exception” clause that would cover this case.
A thread collected at Twichy notes that we are discovering that there are quite a few r@pes of both the forcible and statutory kind which are never detected or punished — because Planned Parenthood dodges its reporting requirements and, of course, “disposes of the evidence.”
There are no “winners” in these stories, you see. The tribalism of identity politics inspired the media to try to score points at the expense of Republicans for outlawing abortion, to which we naturally objected and, once the facts were known, it seemed it might more appropriately be scored a loss for Democrats, as it is their open-borders policy that permitted this to happen in Ohio (instead of Mexico or Guatemala or some other miserable sh**thole country where such atrocities seem to be more common). It does no good for us to clutch our pearls and bemoan the media’s politically motivated promotion of misleading narratives, when the real problem is that the Democratic Party has irreversibly committed itself to every evil thing imaginable — from transgender toddlers to taxpayer-funded late-term abortion to transforming the country by importing millions of impoverished foreigners (who, of course, are expected to vote Democrat). They are the Party of Evil, the Party of Crime, the Party of Perversion. And our so-called “mainstream” media are merely Democratic operatives with bylines.
From the day she got her first period, Olivia Downs has known that she does not want children.
And so, when the 22-year-old visited a new OB-GYN in June, she brought up the possibility of getting her tubes tied, also known as tubal ligation. Downs expected to be questioned about pursuing sterilization at such a young age but she did not anticipate a lecture about how she might “meet Mr. Right” and change her mind.
Her sardonic retelling of the appointment went viral on TikTok last month, amassing 3.4 million views. Thousands of people — including many like-minded women — flooded the comments to weigh in on whether 20-somethings should be eligible for the procedure.
“A lot of women are frustrated because they can’t seem to make decisions for themselves,” Downs told The Post.
Young women who declare they don’t want children have always faced pushback, but the US Supreme Court’s recent decision to overturn the landmark abortion decision Roe v. Wade, has forced Americans — and particularly women of childbearing age — to seriously consider how to manage their bodies as their reproductive rights and choices diminish.
(Actually, you idiot, women’s “reproductive rights,” to use your phrase, are not likely to be restricted in any Northeastern state, since all the Supreme Court did was to return authority to the states in terms of the legality of abortion.)
For Downs, who attends college in Massachusetts and is wary of taking hormonal birth control due to the possible side effects, the Supreme Court’s decision has created additional urgency around getting the procedure done.
“It does kind of scare me a little bit,” she said of Justice Clarence Thomas’s majority opinion. “This is definitely something that I would want to get done sooner rather than later, considering the way this country is moving right now.”
(Actually, you idiot, Alito wrote the decision and, does Olivia Downs seriously think her “right to choose” is at risk in Massachusetts?)
Tubal ligation — in which the fallopian tubes are cut or tied — is one of several surgical sterilization procedures, including salpingectomy (removal of the fallopian tubes) and hysterectomy (removal of the uterus), that women can undergo for a multitude of health reasons and as a form of permanent birth control. Janessa Puckett has been inquiring about a tubal ligation since she was 23 years old.
Now nearly 30, and living in Louisville, Kentucky — a state with an abortion trigger law — Puckett told The Post that she is angling to get the procedure done as soon as possible.
(Post the GoFundMe and we’ll all pitch in to pay for it.)
“I’m just one of many people for which the fire under our collective a– has been fanned in such a violent, visceral way,” she said.
Puckett works as a middle school English teacher and loves children but has never wanted her own. In fact, she said giving birth and being forced to be a parent are her biggest fears.
(This demented woman should never be allowed near children.)
Zaria Grey, 28, wants to get sterilized even though their partner already has had a vasectomy.
Grey (who uses they/them pronouns) lives in Columbus, Ohio with Lukas Killian, 27. Growing up as the eldest of five siblings living below the poverty line, Grey knew they did not want children from an early age.
The pharmacy technician told The Post that reading the Roe draft leak in May, and then hearing the official court decision “definitely added more pressure” on getting sterilized, as Ohio had a trigger law in place.
“I want to take care of my own birth control,” Grey said. “It’s definitely put a lot of fear in my heart that I have absolutely no control over my future. Even less on my body, especially being a Black woman living in America.”
Sterilization should be mandatory for everybody who uses “they/them” pronouns. Mentally defective people should not be reproducing. If anyone expected conservatives to object to these freaks, fanatics and weirdos subtracting their DNA from the gene pool, you’re wrong. We applaud this and wish to do all we can to encourage it. Gosh, if only we could round up all these feminist freaks in camps, and use them as test subjects for medical experiments . . . Lebensunwertes Leben!
Fortunately, none of that Third Reich stuff will be necessary because these “undesirables” have chosen self-inflicted genocide. “Survival of the fittest” is so much easier when the unfit, recognizing their own genetic inferiority, decide for themselves that it’s wrong for them to reproduce.
A Columbus man has been charged with impregnating a 10-year-old Ohio girl, whose travel to Indiana to seek an abortion led to international attention following the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v Wade and activation of Ohio’s abortion law.
(“A Columbus man.” Gotcha.)
Gershon Fuentes, 27, whose last known address was an apartment on Columbus’ Northwest Side, was arrested Tuesday after police say he confessed to raping the child on at least two occasions. He’s since been charged with rape, a felony of the first degree in Ohio.
Columbus police were made aware of the girl’s pregnancy through a referral by Franklin County Children Services that was made by her mother on June 22, Det. Jeffrey Huhn testified Wednesday morning at Fuentes’ arraignment. On June 30, the girl underwent a medical abortion in Indianapolis, Huhn said.
(My apologies for suspecting that this story was entirely made-up, but pregnant 10-year-olds are very rare in the United States, and the lack of corroborating detail in the media accounts led me to think this was like the “hate crime” hoax perpetrated by Jussie Smollett.)
Huhn also testified that DNA from the clinic in Indianapolis is being tested against samples from Fuentes, as well as the child’s siblings, to confirm contribution to the aborted fetus.
Franklin County Municipal Court Judge Cynthia Ebner said the case did not warrant Fuentes — who is believed to be undocumented — to be held without bond.
(Don’t you love the euphemism “believed to be undocumented” as a substitute for the plain English phrase “illegal alien”?)
Ebner said a high bond was necessary, however, due to Fuentes being a possible flight risk and for the safety of the child involved. Before being arrested, Huhn and Det. David Phillips collected a saliva sample from Fuentes, according to a probable cause statement. Ebner set a $2 million bond for Fuentes, who is being held in the Franklin County jail.
So now the liberals who elected Joe Biden, to support a policy of open borders, will raise money to bail out the child rapist Fuentes, who will then flee back to his miserable Third World homeland where pregnant 10-year-olds are significantly more common for obvious reasons. And the only “moral of the story” that the media will allow us to conclude is that ABORTION SHOULD ALWAYS BE LEGAL BECAUSE ZOMG! A WOMAN’S RIGHT TO CHOOSE! NO UTERUS, NO OPINION!
UPDATE: An Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) source has confirmed to Fox News that Fuentes is an illegal alien from Guatemala.
As any student of logic knows, it is very difficult to prove a negative, so I hesitate to say that the latest developments have definitively debunked the sensational story about a 10-year-old Ohio girl going to neighboring Indiana for an abortion. I first called attention to this story (“A Story Too Good to Check?”) on July 4, noting the lack of law enforcement comment as raising suspicions about the story told by abortionist Dr. Caitlin Bernard of Indianapolis. A day later, on July 5, Megan Fox of PJMedia detailed the many “red flags” in the story on her Twitter account:
The story about a 10 yr old pregnant girl who had to go from Ohio to IN for an abortion gives me serious pause for a number of reasons. There are many red flags.?I’m going to detail them here. pic.twitter.com/1PkzmvfzRS
? #2 An unnamed alleged “child abuse” doctor called Dr. Caitlyn Bernard (an abortionist in Indiana) to ask for help. But any doctor who knows of abuse would be required to also call law enforcement. There should be a criminal investigation going involving Ohio DFS and police.
? #4 The article first published in the Indy Star, a local Ohio paper’s site but in record time was picked up by huge international press. On the 2nd, The Hill and Newsweek had it and by the 3rd, The Guardian had it, and by the 4th it was on TMZ, reaching all the kids.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, and any experienced editor would have spotted the biggest problem with this story: It had only one source, Dr. Bernard, who has a history as a media-connected advocate for abortion. She provided no corroborating evidence for this claim, despite the obvious fact that (a) it is very rare for a girl as young as 10 to get pregnant in the United States and (b) such a case would certainly require law enforcement involvement, but no law enforcement officials were quoted in the story. As a boy in middle school, I was taught that journalism was about “5 W’s and an H” — Who, What, When, Where, Why and How — and immediately noticed the absence of where in this story. What city or county in Ohio was the victim from?
If a 10-year-old girl has been raped and impregnated, of course you’re not going to name the victim, so the absence of who in the story is understandable, but why was there no where? If the story had specified Cuyahoga County (i.e., Cleveland), maybe I wouldn’t have been suspicious, because Cleveland is a miserable eyesore of a city, full of criminal scum. If there are 10-year-olds being raped anywhere in Ohio, it’s probably in Cuyahoga County, where Joe Biden got 66% of the vote.
However, though Dr. Bernard may be dishonest, she is not entirely stupid, so she knew that if she specified what city or county this alleged child victim was from, this would allow the reporter to contact police or Department of Family Services (DFS) officials to confirm the story. Therefore, the missing where was a major red flag. Megan Fox later reported that Dr. Bernard was one of nine Indiana abortion providers accused in 2018 of failing to comply with state law requirements for mandatory reporting of abortions involving underage girls:
Some of the girls under 16 years old who had abortions that weren’t reported to [the Indiana Department of Child Services] were as young as 12 and 13. The alleged 48 instances of failure to report occurred since July 1, 2017. The 48 consumer complaints have been filed with Indiana Attorney General Curtis Hill and the Indiana State Department of Health. The Marion, Lake, Tippecanoe and Monroe county prosecutors have also been notified. . . .
In Indiana, it’s a crime for a person 18 or over to engage in any sexual activity with a child under age 16. Indiana lawmakers clarified state reporting requirements in 2017, instructing abortion doctors to report all abortions on girls under 16 to ISDH and DCS within three days of the abortion. Prior to July 1, 2017, state law explicitly required the reporting of abortions on girls under 14.
Considering this accusation, how credible a source is Dr. Bernard?
JESSE WATTERS: So how does Ohio investigating the claim that a 10-year-old girl was raped? Are we looking for the rapist on the loose? Let’s turn to Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost. So, Dave, have you had anybody come to you in your state to say we’re looking into this? A police report was filed?
DAVE YOST, OHIO ATTORNEY GENERAL (R): Not a whisper and we work closely with the centralized law enforcement system in Ohio. We have regular contact with prosecutors and local police and sheriffs. Not a whisper anywhere. Something even more telling, Jesse, is my office runs the state crime lab. Any case like this you are going to have a rape kit, you are going to have biological evidence, and you would be looking for DNA analysis, which we do most of the DNA analysis in Ohio. There is no case request for analysis that looks anything like this.
BREAKING: Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost says there is "not a whisper" that a 10-year-old child was raped and impregnated, there has been no request for crime lab results, and that Ohio's heartbeat law would have allowed such a young girl to get an abortion in the state. pic.twitter.com/oIhJzNiq52
This is about as close to saying “it’s total made-up bullshit” as you’re going to get from a state attorney general, and the pressure should be on Dr. Bernard (and the journalists who repeated her tale) either to provide more details about this alleged case or else admit that the story is total made-up bullshit. Accountability in media? What a concept!
Monday, I called attention to this story (“A Story Too Good to Check?”) about an Indiana abortion doctor who claimed that, just three days after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, she had a 10-year-old girl referred for an abortion from Ohio, where a new law banned abortions after six weeks — and the girl was allegedly just past that gestational threshold. As a longtime editor, the problem was obvious to me:
Where’s the comment from police?
Even if you’re willing to take Dr. Caitlin Bernard’s word for the basic claim — while some 10-year-olds are physically capable of getting pregnant, such cases are very rare — you’ve left the reader knowing nothing about the most basic elements of the story: What Ohio city did this happen in? Do authorities have a suspect in custody? Or is the public still in danger from the child rapist responsible for this atrocity?
What we’re witnessing is a giant step backwards in much of our country. Already, the bans are in effect in 13 states. . . . They’re so extreme that many don’t allow for exceptions, even for rape or incest. Let me say that again: Some of the states don’t allow for exceptions for rape or incest.
This isn’t some imagined horror. It’s already happening. Just last week, it was reported that a 10-year-old girl was a rape victim in Ohio — 10 years old — and she was forced to have to travel out of the state, to Indiana, to seek to terminate the [pregnancy] and maybe save her life. That’s — the last part is my judgment. Ten years old. Ten years old Raped, six weeks pregnant. Already traumatized. Was forced to travel to another state. Imagine being that little girl. Just — I’m serious — just imagine being that little girl. Ten years old.
Does anyone believe that it’s the highest majority view that that should not be able to be dealt with, or in any other state in the nation? A 10-year-old girl should be forced to give birth to a rapist’s child? I can tell you what: I don’t. I can’t think of anything as much more extreme.
The White House has refused to offer proof to support President Biden’s claim that a 10-year-old rape victim was denied an abortion in Ohio and had to travel to Indiana for the procedure.
Mr. Biden said the story illustrated the “extreme” anti-abortion laws taking hold in states after the Supreme Court overturned a nationwide right to abortion.
When asked about the story, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre refused to say if the administration had taken steps to verify the story or if it knew the girl’s identity. Instead, she referred questions to the Justice Department saying there was a “legal component.”
“I would refer you to the DOJ, I don’t have anything more to share on the identity of this young woman or the question you asked,” she said.
She said Mr. Biden highlighted the story to underscore how “extreme” anti-abortion laws are in states that have outlawed the decision.
When pressed again if the administration, including the Justice Department, will take steps to protect the girl, Ms. Jean-Pierre sidestepped the question.
“I think what the president is calling on and what he has laid out is to protect girls and women like her and beyond,” she said.
March 2009: A 10-year-old Haitian girl in Lantana, Florida, became pregnant after a 33-year-old man [Fede Datilus] raped her when she was 9. Her father learned of her pregnancy only when he took her to the clinic when she suffered labor contractions on March 18, 2009. The same day, she gave birth naturally to a full-term boy. . . . She confided that she had been afraid that she and her father would be deported to Haiti — a threat the rapist had used against her. Datilus was sentenced to life imprisonment for raping a minor under 12 years, to which 5 years for impregnating her was added.
April 2008: Isabel Chasearez’s 10-year-old daughter, from St. Anthony, Idaho, gave birth by cesarean section to a girl weighing approximately 6 lb (2.7 kg) at Madison Memorial Hospital in Rexburg after her mother’s boyfriend [Guadalupe Gutierrez-Juarez] raped her. The man, an undocumented immigrant from Mexico, was jailed on one felony count of rape with impregnation; Chasearez was jailed as well for failing to provide proper prenatal care. Juarez was sentenced to 5 years to life.
April 2006: A young girl in Abbeville, South Carolina, gave birth by cesarean section. Her 26-year-old stepfather, William Edward Ronca, raped her. The baby was placed up for adoption. Ronca admitted to having molested the girl over a two-year period and was sentenced to 25 years in prison and is currently incarcerated in the Allendale Correctional Institution.
Three times in more than 20 years. If you went all the way back to 1969 (i.e, more than 50 years), you’d only add five more cases to the list. While we cannot exclude the possibility that some cases might have escaped public notice, the point is, a pregnant 10-year-old is extremely rare, so that the claim that such a case occurred in Ohio just this month, immediately after a new Ohio law went into effect, seems peculiarly convenient. As always, of course, Democrats expect the media to let them get away with telling such stories without fact checking — indeed, the media is actively helping to promote this likely hoax. Because the story has now been made so notorious, however, more reporters now have an incentive to try to verify it and all I can say to them is, good luck.
This headline appeared Friday in the Columbus Dispatch:
As Ohio restricts abortions, 10-year-old
girl travels to Indiana for procedure
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? . . .
Even if you’re willing to take Dr. Caitlin Bernard’s word for the basic claim — while some 10-year-olds are physically capable of getting pregnant, such cases are very rare — you’ve left the reader knowing nothing about the most basic elements of the story: What Ohio city did this happen in? Do authorities have a suspect in custody? Or is the public still in danger from the child rapist responsible for this atrocity?
The extreme youth of the alleged victim is what made the headline so shocking, and I actually checked the National Institutes of Health to make sure I wasn’t alone in finding this highly unusual. The median age of menarche (i.e., onset of menstruation, generally taken as meaning when a female becomes physically capable of pregnancy) in the United States is 11.9, about three months earlier than in the 1990s. About 10% of females reach menarche by age 10. Precocious puberty is slightly correlated with earlier sexual activity — the median age of first intercourse is 15.4 for girls reaching menache by age 10, compared to 16.6 for girls reaching menarche at age 14 or older. In general, blacks and Hispanics reach menarche earlier than white girls, but the differences are not dramatic.
Still, a 10-year-old girl getting pregnant is rare enough in the United States that I had difficulty finding any statistical data on the phenomenon. When you’re talking about something with far less than a 1% probability, good luck finding reliable data. What I was able to find was a 2008 NBC News story reporting that only 17.4% of U.S. abortions involved women under 20. So what were the chances, really, that Dr. Bernard’s Indianapolis clinic would be dealing with the case of a pregnant 10-year-old from Ohio at the very time that the Supreme Court’s ruling made this case relevant to Ohio’s abortion laws?
I don’t trust this kind of “just so” anecdote anchoring a story like this, especially when there is nothing else about the case reported in the story. While I’m not willing to go so far as to call it “fake news,” my editor’s eye immediately noticed the omission of any corroborating details. If a 10-year-old is pregnant, a crime has been committed, and the reader naturally expects such a story to include some comment from law enforcement officials where this crime occurred.
We don’t have that here. Of course, Dr. Bernard would cite medical confidentiality as a reason not to release information about the patient — except the age, because that makes for a good headline — but no reporter should accept this tale without corroborating information.
What this story reminds me of is Curry College in Massachusetts, where it was reported that swastikas were found on campus “directed at black individuals.” Six months later, the college reported:
The College carefully reviewed evidence gathered by law enforcement and interviewed the person of interest identified by law enforcement investigators and other individuals who were potentially connected to specific incidents. The outcome of our independent investigation has resulted in an employee being terminated and removed from our community. The College’s Statement on Non-Discrimination requires confidentiality related to investigations. Therefore, this is the only information we can provide at this time.
So, the former college employee who perpetrated this alleged hate crime is protected by school policy? You can’t even tell us anything which might confirm or contradict our suspicion that the whole thing was a hoax? How convenient, just like the similar confidentiality policy that Dr. Bernard would likely cite as why she can’t tell us anything else about this 10-year-old sex crime victim except that (a) she was 10, (b) she was from Ohio, and (c) she was more than six weeks pregnant in a state that recently outlawed abortion past six weeks gestation.
Nothing to see here, folks. Just another tiny example of how the news media are slowly destroying their own credibility.
Before getting to our main topic here, let me call the reader’s attention to one seemingly minor detail about that photo. See the green sign? See the fine print at the bottom? “RiseUp4AbortionRights-dot-org”? That’s a front group for the Revolutionary Communist Party, a Maoist cult founded by Bob Avakian in Berkeley decades ago, the result of a split in the radical Left during the Nixon years. So who is calling for “ABORTION ON DEMAND & WITHOUT APOLOGY”? Commies, that’s who.
Commies want to kill your baby. Commies want to make baby killing a central premise of their political platform. But at least the RCP is honest about being Commies, whereas Democrats . . .
Well, if Democrats couldn’t lie, they’d have nothing to say at all. But because they control the major institutions of education, journalism and entertainment, Democrats are able to create an echo chamber effect where people are bombarded with propaganda from all directions, so that it takes a strong mind to resist believing Democratic myths like the “constitutional right” to abortion as the essence of womanhood.
I won’t bother excerpting much of this, as readers can click and find their own favorite idiocies in that Vice article. One that I found particularly amusing is the lead anecdote about Sasha Rosenfeld from New Jersey, who is afraid about attending Oberlin College (!!!) because it sits in the red state of Ohio. Oh, the Fear and Loathing:
Committed to attending Oberlin in the fall, Rosenfeld started talking to friends about what she would do if she needed an abortion and couldn’t access care at college. One of her friends who lives 300 miles away in Chicago offered to pick her up and drive her out of the state if she ever needed the procedure. “If I got pregnant — no question about it — at this point in my life, I would take Plan B [or] get an abortion,” she said.
Permit me to assert that the chances of Sasha Rosenfeld accidentally getting pregnant are very close to zero, but not for the reason you might expect. No, she’s not a fat purple-haired non-binary blob, like some of the pro-abortion militants you’ve seen bemoaning the end of Roe. Miss Rosenfeld is actually quite lovely — a slender brunette with a sunny smile who ran on her high school cross-country team in Maplewood, New Jersey. The reason that Miss Rosenfeld is very unlikely to suffer an unexpected pregnancy is because she is a radical feminist whose mother is the lesbian wife of left-wing radio personality Nancy Solomon.
Miss Rosenfeld calls herself “queerspawn,” which is to say she is what folks of my generation might have called a “turkey baster” baby. Miss Rosenfeld’s existence is a sort of protest against heterosexuality, and I’m sure she would never want to disappoint her mothers by expressing anything except vehement disgust toward males. And yet, despite her lifelong anti-heterosexual indoctrination as “queerspawn,” Miss Rosenfeld is gripped with fear about the (entirely hypothetical) prospect of needing an abortion as a consequence of a (preposterously far-fetched) scenario in which she somehow conceived a child through what some of us still quaintly think of as the normal method of impregnation.
Just suppose — since Miss Rosenfeld seems willing to indulge in wild speculation — that she actually were capable of feeling sexual attraction toward a male. As I say, this is entirely speculative, as nothing in her biography or published writing hints at any heterosexual inclination. Yet if she did harbor such a desire, what are the chances she could find a heterosexual male at Oberlin willing to do the deed with her?
Call me old-fashioned, but I think one proxy for the virility of a college’s male student body is the success of their football team, and by this measure, Oberlin is a pathetic joke. Last season, their football team posted a 1-9 record, getting blown away by such gridiron powerhouses as Ohio Wesleyan (62-6), Denison (59-12) and DePauw (66-13). Oberlin’s football team is the laughingstock of a very weak Division III conference. So if it’s swaggering masculinity you’re looking for, you’re not going to find much of it at Oberlin. Even if Miss Rosenfeld were interested in heterosexual coupling (which, as I say, is mere hypothetical speculation), she probably wouldn’t have much luck at such a testosterone-deficient institution as Oberlin College. Yet the imaginary danger terrifies her.
“It’s misogyny in our world that categorizes
feminism, and feminists, as undesirable.”
— Sasha Rosenfeld
Undesirable to whom, Miss Rosenfeld? But probably no one in the echo chamber where you have been raised as “queerspawn” ever asked such a question, or was prepared to explain why this might be relevant, and certainly your worldview won’t be challenged at Oberlin. The chances of you encountering a Republican at Oberlin are not much higher than your chances of becoming pregnant which, as I say, are very close to zero. Yet how could Democrats maintain their ironclad grip on your mind without filling your pretty little head with absurd fears? So you’ll likely go on protesting on behalf of the “right” to abortion, even though the likelihood of you ever needing to exercise this “right” is infinitesimally small.
When this particular tempest in a teapot dissipates — when all the pro-choice sky-is-falling noise proves to be mistaken, and life in America goes on just fine despite the recent Supreme Court ruling — I wonder if some people will wise up to the scam by which they’ve been hustled? Probably not many. True Believers are seldom disillusioned by mere facts.
