Affidavits: 2 more pregnant minors who were raped were denied Ohio abortions

Marty Schladen
Tue, September 27, 2022 

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 abortion providers.

The affidavits were filed in Cincinnati as part of a lawsuit aimed at stopping the enforcement of Ohio’s strict new abortion law. Originally paused for two weeks, the enforcement delay will be extended to at least Oct. 12.

If true, the affidavits show that a 10-year-old from Columbus was not the only child or teen rape victim forced to leave the state. They also describe more than two dozen other instances in which the abortion law put women under extreme duress.

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The descriptions include those of three women who threatened suicide. They also include two women with cancer who couldn’t terminate their pregnancies and also couldn’t get cancer treatment while they were pregnant.

Another three examples were of women whose fetuses had severe abnormalities or other conditions that made a successful pregnancy impossible. Even so, they couldn’t get abortions in Ohio.

And in three cases, debilitating vomiting was caused by pregnancy ‒ so bad in one case that a woman couldn’t get off the clinic floor. But neither could these women get abortions in Ohio, the affidavits said.

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The documents were filed in the case Preterm-Cleveland v. Yost. Having already gotten a temporary order restraining enforcement of the abortion law ‒ Senate Bill 23 ‒ clinics across Ohio are now seeking a preliminary injunction.

In doing so, they’re arguing that SB 23 is so onerous that it violates women’s due process rights under the Ohio Constitution.
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Gov. Mike DeWine signed the law in 2019, but it couldn’t be enforced until the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade on June 24. Many of the affidavits describe how, as soon as the decision overturning Roe was announced that Friday, work at Ohio clinics was thrown into chaos.

Ohio law had allowed abortions until 20 weeks of pregnancy. Now, with only limited exceptions for the life and the health of the mother, no abortions were allowed after fetal cardiac activity could be detected by ultrasound.

In the affidavits, clinic workers said that usually happens after five to six weeks of pregnancy ‒ a point at which as many as a third of women and girls don’t know they’re pregnant.

The new, much-earlier cutoff sent clinic workers scrambling.

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“In the days after SB 23 took effect, we had to cancel over 600 appointments,” Dr. Sharon Liner, medical director of Planned Parenthood Southwest Ohio in Cincinnati, said in her affidavit.

Liner added, “We have had at least three patients threaten to commit suicide. Another patient said she would attempt to terminate her pregnancy by drinking bleach. Another asked how much vitamin C she would need to take to terminate her pregnancy.”

In July, 60% of patients at the clinic had to be turned away because fetal cardiac activity had been detected by the initial ultrasound, Liner said.

The Ohio law requires a 24-hour waiting period and a second negative ultrasound before an abortion can be performed. Because things are changing so quickly at that stage of development, another 16% of women whose fetuses had no cardiac activity during the first exam were turned away in July because it was detected in the second, Liner said.

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“When we tell patients we cannot help them, they are extremely distressed, and all we can offer them is resources, information and emotional support,” Liner said in her affidavit, which was taken while SB 23 was still being enforced.

Ohio clinics have been referring patients who were ineligible for abortions here to clinics and hospitals in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Illinois and New York to get them.

Planned Parenthood of Greater Ohio and other organizations have announced stepped-up assistance to help patients get to those states. But many patients ‒ including at least one homeless woman ‒ said problems with things such as transportation, child care, poverty and getting time off work make the trips virtually impossible, according to the affidavits.

In July, when Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost was raising unfounded doubts about the existence of a 10-year-old rape victim, there was plenty of data indicating that the story was all too plausible.
Raped Ohio teens forced to Michigan, Indiana for abortions

In 2021, Ohio’s Children’s Advocacy Centers saw 6,717 cases of sexual abuse against Ohioans between infancy and adulthood. And in 2020, the most recent year for which statistics are available, 571 girls aged 17 or younger received abortions in Ohio, according to the state department of health. Fifty-two of them ‒ or one a week ‒ were 14 or younger.

The affidavits filed in late August and early September by workers at abortion clinics provide further evidence that child and teen rape and subsequent pregnancy is a problem in Ohio. But so long as fetal cardiac activity is detected, SB 23 requires such victims to either have those babies or scramble out of state and try to find an abortion.

Dr. Adarsh E. Krishen, chief medical officer for Planned Parenthood of Greater Ohio, told of a minor who had been sexually assaulted and had to travel to Michigan for an abortion because of SB 23. Krishen’s organization operates clinics in Columbus and Cleveland.

“This patient experienced immense trauma from the assault itself and then endured further trauma from a forensic interview alongside a physical exam to collect evidence for the ongoing police investigation,” Krishen said in his affidavit. “This trauma was further exacerbated by needing to wait over three weeks for her appointment. In each step of this process she felt the complete denial of bodily autonomy and safety, something all people, especially children, should unequivocally have at all times.”

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Another example shows how SB 23 makes police investigation of child and teen rapes more difficult.

Aeran Trick, operations manager of Women’s Med Center of Dayton, told of “a 16-year-old girl living in Southwestern Ohio who had become pregnant after being sexually assaulted by a family member.”

As with the 10-year-old from Columbus, Trick said this teenager was forced to go to Indianapolis for an abortion.

“The local Ohio law-enforcement agency ‒ which was already involved at the time the clinic was contacted about the patient ‒ had to drive to our Indianapolis clinic to retrieve the tissue for crime lab testing related to the sexual assault investigation,” Trick said in the affidavit. She adds the need to travel increasingly far distances to obtain abortion care could "hamper law enforcement’s ability to investigate and prosecute these cases in the future.”
Cancer patients faced hard choices

The affidavits filed as part of the effort to stop SB 23 describe two cancer patients affected by the law.

Both illustrate doctors’ reluctance to terminate pregnancies despite the law’s exceptions for maternal health – exceptions that some doctors say are ill-defined.

In the days after SB 23 took effect, a pregnant 25-year-old went to a clinic operated by Planned Parenthood of Southwest Ohio, said Liner, the medical director there. The patient had recurrent cancer and was undergoing chemotherapy when she learned that she was pregnant.

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Chemotherapy is dangerous during the first 12 weeks of pregnancy and this patient had already skipped one treatment. But when the clinic determined that she was eight weeks pregnant, workers there said they couldn’t perform an abortion, Liner said.

“Due to the patient having cancer while pregnant, we sought documentation to support a medical exception to S.B. 23 for this patient,” Liner said in her affidavit. “Her provider of care did not feel comfortable providing this and the patient had to travel out of state for an abortion to resume her cancer treatment, which caused further delay.”

Just three days after SB 23 took effect, a 37-year-old suffering from stage III melanoma went to Women’s Med Center in Dayton, Trick, the operations manager there, said. The woman was told by her doctors that she had to terminate her pregnancy before they could treat her, so she, too, would have to leave the state, Trick said.

Other illnesses

The affidavits also detail cases of fetal abnormalities and other problems so severe that pregnancies can’t result in a successful birth. One patient at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Southwest Ohio had a fetus with abnormalities including “a lack of lower extremities and the contents of the fetus’s abdomen, including possibly the heart, protruding through a defect in the abdominal wall,” Liner said in her sworn statement.

Because SB 23 doesn’t allow women in such cases to abort their pregnancies if they don’t pose an imminent threat to their health, they either have to leave the state for an abortion or carry the fetus to term ‒ even though that “can be extremely distressing for patients,” Liner said.

The Ohio Capital Journal is an independent, nonprofit news organization dedicated to connecting Ohioans to their state government and its impact on their lives. It is part of States Newsroom, a national 501(c)(3) nonprofit supported by grants and a coalition of donors and readers.

This article originally appeared on Cincinnati Enquirer: 10 year old Ohio abortion: 2 more raped minors denied Ohio abortions