The devastating effects of the US Supreme Court’s abortion decision have come to light in the case of a 10-year-old Ohio child rape victim who was six weeks pregnant, ineligible for an abortion in her home state, and forced to fly to Indiana for the surgery.
Following the Supreme Court’s decision to invalidate 1973’s Roe v. Wade and the constitutional right to abortion, Dr. Caitlin Bernard, an obstetrician-gynecologist in Indianapolis, informed The Cincinnati Enquirer that she had terminated a pregnancy for a 10-year-old girl who had traveled from Ohio.
A child abuse physician in Ohio referred her to the patient on Monday after the state barred abortion after six weeks of pregnancy in response to the SCOTUS decision. The pregnant girl was six weeks, three days along.
Despite the fact that abortion is still legal in Indiana, Dr. Bernard is concerned that soon medical professionals there won’t be able to offer the procedure either because state legislators are anticipated to further restrict or outright outlaw it on July 25 during a special session of the Indiana General Assembly.
It’s difficult to believe that we won’t be able to offer that service in just a few short weeks, Dr. Bernard added.
Since the SCOTUS decision, Indiana abortion clinics have experienced an increase in out-of-state clients. Another Indiana ob-gyn, Dr. Katie McHugh, told the Enquirer that she has received “an incredible amount of inquiries” from Ohio and Kentucky, with the number of out-of-state calls increasing from five to eight per day to about twenty.
Ohio abortion clinics have filed a lawsuit seeking to declare the state’s six-week ban unconstitutional, while a Kentucky judge has temporarily blocked the state from passing a “trigger ban” on abortion.
In the past, Joe Biden has reiterated his support for abortion, saying at a press conference on Thursday in Madrid that he will have news to share after meeting with some governors this weekend.
He declared emphatically, “I think we have to codify Roe v. Wade in the law. That’s the most important thing to be clear about. “The best way to accomplish that is to ensure that Congress votes to do that, and if the filibuster comes in the way, it’s like voting rights – it should be [that] we create an exception to this… needing an exception to the filibuster for this measure to address the Supreme Court judgment.”
The 6-to-3 decision last month overturned nearly 50 years of tradition and granted states the authority to enact their own abortion-related legislation. After their governors passed trigger legislation in response to the SCOTUS verdict, Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, and South Dakota have already outlawed abortion in their states.
Since then, demonstrations have taken place all throughout the nation, and 79-year-old Joe Biden has spoken out against the decision, which he called “the realization of an extreme ideology and a catastrophic miscalculation by the Supreme Court.”
Following the SCOTUS opinion’s disclosure to Politico in May, the decision was made. Since then, a CNN survey has revealed that 66 percent of Americans oppose overturning Roe v. Wade.
Source: WayneDupree.com