Earlier this week, during a Senate committee hearing on the impact of Roe v. Wade being overturned, Missouri Republican Sen. Josh Hawley interrupted UC Berkeley law professor Khiara Bridges after she used the phrase “people with the capacity for pregnancy.”
“You refer to ‘people with the capacity for pregnancy,” Hawley droned, shit-eating grin spreading across his face. “Would that be ‘women’?”
Bridges snapped back—to paraphrase—that not all women can become pregnant, and that Hawley’s language erased people who can become pregnant who are trans and non-binary.
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Hawley was clearly satisfied that he’d gotten to add his contribution to the transphobic “What is a woman?” memosphere. The question has become a right-wing culture war rallying cry that aims to present inclusive language around gender and pregnancy as somehow an existential threat to “women” as a category of human beings, language that has found its way from MAGA-drenched Facebook cesspools.
Just as Hawley was marinating in his own karmic ooze, the same right-wing media apparatus that lambasts phrasing like “pregnant people” was questioning the validity of a truly horrible story out of Indiana.
The story, first published by the Indianapolis Star, relied on an on-the-record statement from a doctor who said she’d provided abortion care for a 10-year-old rape victim from Ohio who, days after the Dobbs ruling enabled Ohio’s six-week no exceptions abortion ban to go into effect, discovered that she was six weeks and three days pregnant and thus ineligible for abortion care in her state. The girl and her mother were forced to travel to neighboring Indiana to terminate the pregnancy.
Rather than facing the cruel reality of their ideological position cheerleading no-exceptions abortion bans, members of the conservative media decided collectively that the story couldn’t be real. They set out to prove that the doctor was a liar, and that pro-choice people had made the whole thing up.
From the unhinged ramblings of Just Asking Questions lipstick-toothed bloggers to Fox News primetime to a Wall Street Journal editorial that accused abortion rights proponents of amplifying “an abortion story too good to verify”—the right-wing media septic tank was giddy to prove its point. In their telling, the left was just making shit up and the whole sob story of a pregnant 10-year-old was—to borrow a word frequently deployed by Wall Street Journal editorial board member James Taranto—a “fanciful” argument meant to make a post-Roe America seem much more barbaric than it actually was.
Politicians got in on the act, too. Rep. Jim Jordan—who has been accused by numerous Ohio State University wrestlers of ignoring sex abuse allegations against the team’s doctor—tweeted his skepticism. Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost appeared on Fox News on Monday to insist that he hadn’t heard anything about the case. “Not a whisper,” Yost said. “I know our prosecutors and cops in this state—there’s not one of them that wouldn’t be turning over every rock in their jurisdiction if they had the slightest of hints that this occurred there.”
They were all “just asking questions!” They were just trying to “verify a single-sourced story.” They just wanted the truth!
Pardon me if I find it a little far-fetched that the same people who politically support a man who once suggested that we can cure COVID by injecting bleach directly into our veins are suddenly sticklers for truth and journalistic integrity.
On Wednesday, charges were filed against the 27-year-old man who had raped and impregnated a 10-year-old girl at the center of the case Ohio’s top prosecutor said he had heard “not a whisper” about. Maybe Attorney General Dave Yost should clean out his ears.
Those leading the charge to discredit the story suddenly pivoted and backpedaled like they were running drills in a fourth grade Saturday basketball clinic.
Yost was suddenly relieved that a predator was off the streets. Rep. Jordan’s tweets mysteriously vanished. Fox News was vindicated by the fact that the accused rapist was an undocumented immigrant, thus proving what they’ve always been saying, which is that those people are bad. Jesse Watters went from calling the abortion doctor who performed the termination a liar to accusing her of not reporting the girl’s rape appropriately. (“I’m not owned! I’m not owned!”) And the attorney general of Indiana vowed to investigate the doctor who performed the procedure.
Others accused reproductive justice advocates of wanting it to be true that a 10-year-old girl was raped and impregnated. But nobody who pays attention to the reality of abortion in America would have found the story of a child who has been impregnated as the result of sexual abuse far-fetched. It happens every day. Anti-abortion zealots have their soft-focus roadside billboard blinders strapped on so tightly that it’s cut off circulation to their brains.
In 2013, 7,400 American children 14 and younger were impregnated, according to the Guttmacher Institute. (This number, thankfully, has been trending downward since peaking in the early 1990s, but horrifyingly, is not yet “zero.”) In 2018, about 350,000 girls under 18 become pregnant every year. In no U.S. state is the age of legal consent below age 16. All of the (mostly male) politicians and media figures acting as though the case of a pregnant 10-year-old is some unheard of, impossible tragedy should know better. They’re all old enough to know better.
On Thursday, the Senate—average age: 64.3, average sex: male—voted down a bill that would federally enshrine the right for people to travel to other states to obtain abortion care. It would not have failed if not for preservation of the filibuster, but I guess the Senate is on-brand to carry around something harmful in the service of an outdated ideology. State governments across the country are already emboldened to turn pregnant people in crisis into criminals; I can’t imagine what interstate travel restrictions would have meant to a kid who isn’t even old enough to get a driver’s permit being suddenly forced by the state to deliver their rapist’s baby.
Which brings me back to Sen. Josh Hawley. I wonder if he thinks that the 10-year-old girl conservatives have been chomping at the bit to identify counts as a “woman.” Would she be a woman if she were 14? What if she were his relative? What if she were his daughter?
With all due respect to Professor Bridges, Hawley’s smarmy “Would that be ‘women’?” does even more harm than erasing trans and nonbinary people. It also erases the thousands of children and teenagers who need abortion care every year, many of whom are survivors of something horrible.
Recognizing that abortion bans are specifically inhumane to victims is not tantamount to politicization of sexual abuse, it is tantamount to recognizing reality.
