The first doctor in public

fall victim to the anti

–

abortion frenzy that followed the overthrow of Roe vs

.

Wade was upheld last month when Indiana medical officials ruled she failed to report child abuse and was not unfit to practice medicine after she provided abortion care to a 10-year-old and told a reporter.

Ridiculous, however, the

state medical board

found Dr Caitlin Bernard $3,000 for violating the privacy rights of her unnamed patients.

The board members’ ruling, as reported, did not clarify exactly what protected information she had released.

I’ve been rooting hard for Bernard, an OB-GYN who works for Indiana University Health, since Republican Indiana Atty. General Todd Rokita began a campaign of intimidation against her. She is exactly the kind of thoughtful and courageous doctor we need at a time when women’s reproductive rights are being trampled underfoot.

homes across the country.

Watching clips of her wiping away tears and defending herself in a hearing room for nearly 15 hours is proof that we now live in a dystopia where logic and proportion, to quote Grace Slick, have fallen sloppily dead.

About a year ago, four

days after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion, Bernard was at an abortion rights meeting and spoke to a colleague about the girls’ case. A reporter for the Indianapolis Star

who was working on a story about the consequences of the Supreme Court decision overheard her and asked her about it.

Without disclosing any information that compromised her patient’s confidentiality, Bernard said she received a call from a child abuse physician in Ohio, where abortion had suddenly become illegal after six weeks of pregnancy. A young person who spent three days across the border needed abortion care. In a sane world, a state wouldn’t force a 10-year-old to give birth to a child after being raped, or to cross state lines for help.

Yet here we are.

The Star story caught fire. Even President Biden denounced the injustice. Conservatives went wild, accusing Bernard of fabricating the story. Another lie. Surprised anyone? Ohio Republican U.S. Representative Jim Jordan clenched in a tweet he later deleted.

That’s what Ohio’s Republican Attorney General said bluntly on Fox News

[July 11]

that there was no whisper anywhere that a 10-year-old was raped in his state. He lied or was unaware. Two days later, the Columbus Dispatch reported

[July 13]

that there had been an arrest and confession in the case. It also turns out that the child was 9 when she was raped.

Rokita’s blatantly unprofessional behavior continued to inflame the situation. He described Bernard to Fox News as this abortion activist who acted as a doctor with a history of not reporting. In violation of state law, he publicly discussed his plan to investigate Bernard, which a judge said had caused her irreparable harm.

The Indiana Supreme Court Disciplinary Committee launched an investigation into Rokita after the former dean of

Indiana University Law School

filed a complaint against him. If he can throw the entire weight of his office without repercussions to kill Dr. Bernard, can he do that to attack any citizen he disagrees with, wrote Lauren Robel, the former dean. This is the opposite of the rule of law.

Bernard, who has been threatened and harassed, has informed Rokita that she can sue him for defamation; she has until July 2024 to file a lawsuit.

Rokita, for his part, acted as if he had won a huge victory after the medical board hearing. Thanks to my great team, hi tweeted, the abortion doctor was given the maximum civil fine for violating three points of privacy laws and was given a public reprimand to go into a national database.

Donna Shalala, the first

US

The Secretary of Health and Human Services, who helped draft the federal HIPAA patient privacy law, told the Indianapolis Star that there was no way Bernard had released enough information to identify her young patient. They are criminalizing the practice of medicine, she said, and they are literally asking the doctors in this country to do evil.

The endgame of political cynics like Rokita is the complete ban on abortion in America, despite the overwhelming public feeling that it should be legal in most circumstances.

I wish I could say there will never be a total ban, but I’ve given up making predictions about the strength of our democracy’s guardrails or the Supreme Court’s commitment to human rights.

However, one thing we can predict with a high degree of confidence is the number of people who will die if they are forced to have children they do not want. It is irrefutably true that childbirth is far more dangerous to a woman’s health than an abortion.

The maternal mortality rate in this country is already embarrassingly high

for compared to others

wealthy nation

S

. In the US, an estimated 23.8 maternal deaths occur for every 100,000 births, nearly three times

even higher

than

in

most similar nations.

University of Colorado sociologist Amanda Stevenson predicted in a 2021 paper that if both maternal mortality rates and the number of pregnancies per year held constant, a total ban on abortion would increase maternal mortality by about 21% in the total population, and by about 33%. % among black people.

This is

,

of course a sweeping hypothesis, but it makes sense.

As Stevenson writes, the upcoming abortion bans, if fully successful in preventing people from having wanted abortions, will increase maternal deaths simply because childbirth in the US is much more deadly than an induced abortion.

Do anti

–

abortion extremists understand the inherent cruelty of forcing a 10-year-old to give birth? If doctors like it

Caitlyn Bernard

have been silenced

they opponents

will never face the horrible truth of what the Supreme Court has wrought.

@robinkabcarian