Their aim is clear: they don’t just want to make abortion inaccessible. They want to make it unspeakable.

Caitlin Bernard the Indiana doctor has long been a champion of reproductive rights; she joined a 2019 lawsuit challenging her state’s Roe-era ban on dilation and evacuation abortions, or D&E procedures; she’s long been outspoken, in her very red state, about her faith that women and girls are worthy of control over their own bodies. So maybe Indiana Republicans, like the attorney general Todd Rokita, already thought of her as an enemy in July 2022, when, just days after the supreme court’s Dobbs decision overturned Roe and threw an anti-abortion trigger ban into effect in neighboring Ohio, Bernard performed an abortion on a patient who had had to travel to Indiana to get her procedure: a 10-year-old girl, the victim of rape. 

This act alone – Bernard’s gesture of compassion and respect to an abused child, one that spared the young girl the danger and torture of an underage, rape-produced pregnancy and helped to end the suffering and indignity that followed her assault, is itself a solemn kind of service. Bernard’s work brought her into the darkest realities of what men do to women – raping and impregnating them as children, making laws that will keep them pregnant against their will, as children, unless they can flee – and to face that darkness with integrity and courage. Few of us would have the capacity to do what Bernard did in treating that child; few of us would be able to face that truth about our world.

 Fewer still would survive what came next: Bernard became the target of a large-scale, coordinated campaign of hate, intimidation and professional harassment, coordinated by Republican officials in her state government, in retaliation for her pro-choice speech. 

 By Moira Donegan, read more.