10-year-old rape victim forced to travel for abortion care underscores extreme post-Roe restrictions

Sign up for the daily Inside Washington email for exclusive US coverage and analysis sent to your inbox Get our free Inside Washington email Get our free Inside Washington email SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy policy The case of a 10-year-old rape victim in Ohio, where abortions after six weeks of pregnancy are outlawed, who was forced to travel for care in Indiana has underscored the dramatic, far-reaching consequences of the end of constitutional protections for abortion care in the wake of the US Supreme Court’s landmark decision to strike down Roe v Wade. Recommended What abortion access looks like in every state after the Supreme Court strikes down Roe v Wade Ohio’s “trigger” law prohibits abortions past six weeks of pregnancy, before many patients know they are pregnant, or roughly two weeks after a missed period. “And so there’s more that we have got to do to make sure that we really are living a life that says every life is precious, especially innocent lives that have been shattered, like that 10-year-old girl.” She made similar remarks a week earlier, telling CBS Face the Nationthat she “never believed that “having a tragedy or a tragic situation happen to someone is a reason to have another tragedy occur.” When pressed by NBC’s Meet the Press host Chuck Todd last week whether he supports his state’s law that prevents a hypothetical 13-year-old rape victim from getting an abortion, Arkansas’s Republican Governor Asa Hutchinson said he would “prefer a different outcome”. Providers and advocates in Idaho, Mississippi, North Dakota and Wyoming – four states that have rape or incest exceptions in their abortion bans — have warned that while those laws do allow people to end pregnancies in those cases, it will likely be easier to assist their patients’ travel to another state than it would be to clear the extremely narrow state-level obstacles to legal care.