Why Aren’t Conservatives Celebrating the Post-Roe Future They Created?

It was also predictable not only as a logical by-product of the Ohio law specifically but also based on what life is like in other countries that have total or near-total bans on abortion. In Paraguay, where abortion is banned unless it threatens the mother’s life, health officials forced an 11-year-old girl to carry a pregnancy until she could obtain a cesarean section after she was raped by her stepfather in 2015. An 11-year-old girl in Argentina, which had similarly strict laws until recently, delivered a 23-week-old baby by cesarean section in 2019 after officials there refused to allow her to obtain an abortion. The young Argentine girl reportedly attempted suicide twice and begged doctors to “remove what the old man put inside me.”

It’s unclear exactly how often this phenomenon occurs—and even a single instance of it is heartrending—but available numbers suggest it occurs with some frequency. Amnesty International reported last year that in Paraguay, which ranks between New Jersey and Arizona in population, more than 1,000 girls who were 14 years old or younger gave birth in 2019 and early 2020. An analysis this week by The Columbus Dispatch found 50 reports of rape or sexual abuse toward girls 15 years old or younger in Columbus, Ohio, since May of this year. Using data from the Ohio Department of Health, the newspaper also reported that 306 girls who were 15 years old or younger obtained an abortion in that state between 2016 and 2020.

You do not need a medical degree to know that it is neither safe nor healthy for a 10-year-old or 11-year-old child to deliver a baby. But testing the limits of the maternal-health exception could be a dark new frontier for abortion litigation. Earlier this month, the Biden administration issued new guidance that said a federal law on emergency room care requires hospitals to provide medically necessary abortions even if a state law bans the procedure without a health exception. The state of Texas filed a lawsuit in federal court to overturn that guidance on Thursday, arguing that the federal law in question did not apply to abortion even in life-threatening circumstances. Texas did stress, however, that the law applied when a medical emergency “threatens the life of the unborn child.”