On Tuesday evening, I reported on the homepage that Dr. Caitlin Bernard sat down for a friendly interview with MSNBC last week but has refused to answer key factual questions — from the Washington Post Fact Checker, Snopes, and National Review — about her story of a ten-year-old Ohio rape victim who traveled to Indiana for an abortion allegedly due to Ohio’s six-week legal limit on abortion.
The anonymous Ohio doctor in the story would be obligated to report a case of suspected child rape to the authorities, but Ohio’s attorney general says there is no indication such a case has been reported anywhere in the state. Bernard would not tell the Washington Post Fact Checker the jurisdiction in which the alleged crime occurred.
Shortly after my report was published, Fox News reported that according to an anonymous “source familiar [with] the situation” there was a ten-year-old girl from Ohio who went to Indiana seeking an abortion, but “what is still unclear tonight,” Fox News reporter Aishah Hasnie said, “is whether this girl was forced to cross state lines as [President Biden] alleged, or was she simply referred to an expert in a different state? As Ohio’s attorney general told [Fox News host] Jesse Watters last night, the girl did not need to leave the state, she would have been legally able to get an abortion in Ohio.”
Update (July 13, 1:27p.m.): The Columbus Dispatch confirms the story that a ten-year-old girl in Ohio who was raped traveled to Indiana for an abortion, and an arrest has been made.