By David DeWitt, Ohio Capital Journal, Used with Permission.
For 82 days last year, the impacts of Ohio Republicans’ six-week abortion ban threw our state’s medical community and patients into chaos, confusion, and nightmare scenarios that made international headlines.
Ohio’s abortion ban law that includes no exceptions for rape or incest was held up in court after being signed by Gov. Mike DeWine in 2019. It came crashing back following the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision on June 24, 2022 to overturn Roe v. Wade.
Less than an hour after the decision, Attorney General Dave Yost filed to have a federal court lift an injunction on Ohio’s six-week ban. That night, the court granted the motion and DeWine signed an executive order permitting the Ohio Department of Health to set up rules for enforcement.
Three days later, a 10-year-old rape victim had to flee Ohio to Indiana for abortion care. The story made national news, but instead of acknowledging the devastating consequences of the extremist law Ohio Republicans had worked for decades to pass, they instead attempted to erase the 10-year-old’s story.
Yost went on Fox News to raise doubts about whether the story was true. Alex Triantafilou, who has since become the chairman of the Ohio Republican Party, went on Twitter to call the case, “A garbage lie that a simple google search confirms is debunked.” Ohio U.S. Rep. Jim Jordan tweeted, “Another lie. Anyone surprised?”
The story was not a lie: On July 12, Columbus police arrested the rapist, confirming the story. This past summer, he was sentenced to life in prison.
Ohio Republicans’ radical abortion ban remained in place from June 24, 2022 until a Hamilton County Common Pleas Court judge issued a temporary restraining order against it on Sept. 14, 2022, and a preliminary injunction against it on Oct. 7, 2022. The Republican-controlled Ohio Supreme Court is now considering whether or not to lift that injunction while the Hamilton County case proceeds.
With the injunction currently still in place, abortion is legal in Ohio up until 22 weeks. If the Republican Ohio Supreme Court majority lifts the injunction, then Ohio’s six-week ban comes roaring back once again.
That is, unless Ohio voters decide to pass Issue 1 on Nov. 7, putting protections for reproductive rights such as abortion care, miscarriage care, contraception, fertility treatment, and continuing one’s pregnancy in the state constitution. The amendment would protect access to abortion care up to the point of fetal viability, and would only be allowed after that point to protect the life of the mother.
The nightmare scenarios during the nearly 12 weeks that Ohio’s extremist abortion ban was in place did not stop with the tragic story of the 10-year-old.
At least two more minors made pregnant by sexual assault were forced to leave Ohio to avoid having their rapists’ babies, according to sworn affidavits filed by doctors.
Ohio’s own abortion statistics show that it’s disturbingly possible for children to become impregnated. In 2022, 42 girls aged 14 and younger had abortions in Ohio, according to the state department of health. In 2021, it was 57. In 2020, it was 52. Ten-year-olds who become pregnant are by definition rape victims, but again, Ohio’s six-week abortion ban law doesn’t make exceptions for rape or incest.
The traumatic consequences of the law that prevented child rape victims from receiving abortion health care stretched well beyond them. The doctors’ affidavits also described more than two dozen other instances in which the abortion law put Ohio women under extreme duress.
They included two women with cancer who couldn’t terminate their pregnancies and also couldn’t get cancer treatment while they were pregnant.
Other women had partially delivered fetuses too undeveloped to survive only to see the delivery stall. In that condition, with the fetus partly out, they had to sign paperwork — and then wait for 24 hours, or for the fetus’s heart to stop.
Women suffering other complications such as a detached umbilical cord faced similar intrusions just after they were devastated to learn they would lose a child they dearly wanted. They, too, had to wait a day or for fetal demise. In one instance, that took 14 hours, a doctor said.
Still other women — shattered to learn that the baby they’re carrying lacks vital organs necessary for survival — were told that in Ohio they had to carry that baby, possibly for months, only to see it be stillborn, or to watch it quickly die.
“Being forced to go down the path is just an unequivocal nightmare, especially if you think of someone going through an entire pregnancy against their will when they know the fetus is going to die,” said Dr. David Hackney, maternal fetal medicine specialist in the Cleveland area, and chair of the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecologist’s Ohio chapter.
In the affidavits, doctors described the scene as women and girls suddenly learned they couldn’t get the abortions they were planning on: Many cried inconsolably. Several threatened suicide. One woman said she’d drink bleach. A high school student who couldn’t stop vomiting was hospitalized and placed on suicide watch. One woman said she’d try to end her pregnancy by hurling herself down some stairs
Under the six-week ban, Ohio doctors faced potential felony criminal charges and risks to their medical licenses because of what they said are unclear regulations and specifications on abortion stemming from the law.
Doctors said that the six-week ban had them working against their Hippocratic oaths to do no harm.
“These are dire pregnancies,” said maternal fetal medicine doctor Tani Malhotra. The mothers “are so devastated as it is. And we are just re-traumatizing them over and over again. And it’s heartbreaking to watch them already going through the movements of accepting the loss that they’re about to have and then we come in and say ‘Sign these papers’ so we can add insult to injury.”
For doctors, when and whether the law permits abortions is not an academic exercise: If they violate it, they can be charged with felonies, be sued in civil court, and subjected to professional sanctions. Nevertheless, Yost failed to provide medical practitioners any legal guidance around the law.
The pain, suffering, chaos, and confusion described above is the reality that Ohioans experienced from June 24, 2022 until Sept. 14, 2022 under the six-week abortion ban that opponents of Ohio Issue 1 are fighting to keep as Ohio law.
Ohio voters now have less than 20 days to decide if they want to help revive that reality, or pass a proposed amendment that would prevent it.
Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
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