(Update below)
Dr. Caitlin Bernard is the Indiana OB-GYN who, on June 30, performed an abortion on a ten-year old girl who had been raped in Ohio. The abortion took place in Indiana because Ohio’s trigger law, which went into effect immediately after the Supreme Court overturned Roe, bars exceptions for rape or incest including, obviously, for young children. The Indianapolis Star quoted Dr. Bernard the next day that she’d received a call from a colleague in Ohio who treats child abuse cases and asked if Bernard could perform the procedure.1
The story, of course, quickly set off a firestorm. And just as quickly, it became a political problem for Republicans. As Josh Marshall wrote today:
In the escalating backlash against the Dobbs decision, which is flowing into the midterm election campaign, Republicans simply aren’t prepared to grapple with the growing number of horror stories triggered by the draconian laws they themselves both demanded and are busy forcing into law.
Faced almost immediately with one of those horror stories, the right-wing attack machine quickly mobilized to gun for Dr. Bernard. The usual suspects, including FOX News and the broader Murdoch media empire (including the Wall Street Journal) first cast doubt on the story and then asserted that it was an outright fabrication. GOP officials, including Todd Rokita, Indiana’s Attorney General, Dave Yost, Rokita’s Ohio counterpart, the odious Congressman Jim Jordan, South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem and others piled on. Dr. Bernard’s colleague at the Indiana University School of Medicine, Dr. Tracey Wilkinson, wrote in the New York Times today that Dr. Bernard has been the subject of a relentless campaign of vilification, including the threat of a criminal investigation by Rokita, on baseless grounds. As Marshall pointed out, “there is a lengthy history of violence, going as far as murder, against doctors who perform abortions, especially when they are at the center of national media campaigns.”
The doubts about Dr. Bernard’s account and her integrity were further inflamed when Glenn Kessler, the Washington Post’s fact checker, weighed in last weekend to suggest that the single-source story deserved further scrutiny. In principle, it’s not wrong for Kessler to want to evaluate the sources for Bernard’s report. But as Laura Hazard Owen wrote for Nieman Lab, there were perfectly “non-nefarious reasons” for why Bernard would not be willing to disclose details about the girl or her circumstances, including adherence to medical privacy laws generally and those relating to rape specifically.
Two days ago, a 27-year old man was arraigned in Franklin County, Ohio for the rape of a girl. Subsequent reporting confirmed that he was the alleged rapist of the ten year old girl Dr. Bernard treated in Indiana. It’s no surprise that right-wingers like Rokita have refused to acknowledge they were wrong. More disappointing, Kessler himself hasn’t really apologized at all for the shortcomings in his original piece. Hazard Owen noted, for example, that Kessler had described as “pretty rare” a 10 year old having an abortion. But as Hazard Owen observed, “rare” is a matter of context. 52 girls under the age of fifteen reportedly had abortions in Ohio in 2020 and this is almost certainly an under count. Regardless, based on that number, it’s reasonable to assume that the national figure is somewhere in the hundreds or perhaps low thousands. So maybe it’s rare in the sense that ten year olds would be a small fraction of all rape victims to have an abortion. But isn’t that missing the larger point of all this, which is that young girls who have been raped and impregnated will, in fact, increasingly be forced to flee their state to have an abortion, or be forced to carry the fetus to term? What did it add to Kessler’s analysis to note that such cases are rare, except to signal his own skepticism?
The story could have been made up, of course. But the basis for Kessler’s skepticism, in the absence of better information than he was working with, was itself colored by his own biases and flawed understanding of the fraught issues involved. And his attempts to explain himself after the fact have frankly been disgraceful. Kessler told Hazard Owen that his concerns were warranted in part because the rape story “was picked up by outlets around the world and it was based on one source — someone who was an activist in one side of the debate (my bold)— without an apparent effort to confirm it.” Kessler’s framing insinuates that Dr. Bernard was a political actor in the same way that Rokita and Yost are, and therefore had the same incentives to that they had to demagogue the issue. This is obtuse and frankly astonishingly politically naive.
After Bernard’s account was further confirmed, Kessler addended what were, to him, a series of pointed questions about how *other* people’s failures were responsible for his original analysis. For example, Kessler asked “[s]hould Bernard have disclosed the case before the police charged a suspect?” Think about this question for a moment. Bernard performed an abortion on a ten year old girl. By definition, the girl had been raped. She also had to leave Ohio because of that state’s draconian new law, which Bernard knew. Why on earth should she have silenced herself about something so monstrous, prior to a charge? She wasn’t accusing a specific person of the crime. She was recounting what she herself had done, an act that is obviously and profoundly newsworthy and horrifying. Kessler also asks whether the Star should have run the story based on a single source. He asserts that that the Star made no other attempt to verify Bernard’s claim. I don’t know whether that is true, and neither does Kessler. But I do wonder whether Kessler has a habit of questioning stories primarily based on the fact that they are only single-sourced. Maybe he does. But color me skeptical that that fact alone piqued his interest.
Kessler often does good work and certainly gets it from “both sides.” Further, he is not responsible for the media strategy that right-wing elites deploy when they flood the zone with disinformation. But Kessler came up woefully short here, betraying ignorance of the nuances of the issues themselves, the context in which the story appeared and the incentives of the parties involved. Kessler has an important platform and as these horror stories accumulate, he needs to do better at reporting on them.
Update: I may have given Kessler too *much* credit. Natalie Shure is a health researcher and writer. She adds:
Indiana will almost certainly enact a total ban similar to Ohio’s in the next few weeks. But it has not yet done so.
I was only following through the occasional tweets as I was on vacation this past week, but, damn, Kessler sure blew it on this one. When I saw people sharing the factcheck, I did think "well, the story is a liberal nightmare-fantasy come true, so maybe it is made up." But, yeah, Kessler made some pretty big mistakes here that you expertly called out.
Since we are on the subject of one-sided media reporting, or at least commentary, I wonder if there isn't value in lobbying to reinstate the FCC Fairness Doctrine. It seems that that US media was at its fariest during this era, and it's been pretty much downhill since Reagan eliminated it. Thoughts?