A few days after the Supreme Court’s decision to repeal the right to abortion, this little girl had to travel to a neighboring state to have her pregnancy terminated.
While the Supreme Court of the United States has just repealed the right to abortion, this decision is already having tragic consequences for thousands of women and girls across the country. The newspaper Columbus Dispatch has just given the example of a ten-year-old girl who was refused an abortion in her state of Ohio, forcing her to travel to neighboring Indiana, where this practice is still authorized, to perform a IVG. She had exceeded the now legal deadline of six weeks by three days.
“A 10-year-old girl is raped. The state forces her to stay pregnant and tells her to consider it an ‘opportunity’. It’s not Iran. It’s not Gilead. It’s not hypothetical. It happened today in Ohio”tweeted Gavi Begtrup, an elected Democrat from Ohio.
the Columbus Dispatch did not specify under what circumstances this little girl became pregnant, but it was an Ohio child abuse doctor who asked an Indiana gynecologist, Dr. Caitlin Bernard, to please take into account charges his little patient. However, by the end of July, this will probably no longer be possible either in the latter state, whose legislators must in turn ban or severely limit terminations of pregnancy from the end of July.
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“It’s hard to imagine that in just a few weeks we won’t be able to provide this care”, laments Dr. Bernard. States where abortions are still authorized are currently seeing the number of interventions explode. The newspaper Indianapolis Star reports that the number of abortions performed each day on women from other states has increased from five to eight per day to around twenty since the Supreme Court’s decision. Abortion rights advocates now fear that the most abortion-restrictive states will try to prevent women from traveling to terminate a pregnancy in the future.