Indiana obstetrician-gynecologist Dr. Caitlin Bernard provided abortion services to the girl according to the state’s Department of Health records in a case which inflamed political debate after the Supreme Court overturned federal rights for terminations.
Gerson Fuentes, 27, was arrested on suspicion of raping the girl who was from Ohio, where abortion is outlawed for pregnancies effectively beyond six weeks.
But after the girl traveled to Indiana for the procedure which is still legal up to 22 weeks of pregnancy, Bernard was condemned by conservatives, including the state’s attorney general Todd Rokita.
Bernard is suing Rokita for defamation and she wrote in The Washington Post that the events of the last few weeks had taken their toll.
“Life has been hard — for me and for my family,” she wrote, “I’ve been called a liar. I’ve had my medical and ethical integrity questioned on national television by people who have never met me. I’ve been threatened.”
She said as one of the few doctors in the state who provides abortion services for 12 years, her mission “has always been to provide the best care to each patient who comes to me.”
“Every patient I see has a full life story, with a history and hopes and dreams” she said, be they Christian, Muslim, atheist, children or grandmothers, and all “are doing their best to take care of themselves and their families.”
“Most important, they had the constitutional right to seek an abortion legally, a right that has now been taken away,” she said.
Although she did not mention the case of the 10-year-old girl directly in her op-ed, she wrote “what keeps me up at night” is knowing that despite her training and experience, her services “may be denied to patients who need us” because “the government has tied our hands.”
She said she feared that the overturning of Roe vs Wade will pave the way for states “to severely limit abortion care or ban access entirely” which will mean that “health outcomes for girls and women will get worse.”
“Patients will be forced to find care in faraway, unfamiliar places” or continue with “dangerous, traumatic or unwanted pregnancies, as well as, “turn to desperate measures.”
Among them is Indiana, whose legislature will contemplate dramatically restricting abortion. She said that lawmakers who debate the fate of women “will never face my patients” and “will never stand in their shoes or hold their hands. They will never know their pain.
“Legislators are the last people who should be in the business of deciding who gets medical care and who does not,” she added.
While she has faced criticism, she has also been praised across the country and acknowledged that some people “have called me brave.”
“But I’m not any braver than any other physician who would do the right thing when faced with a patient in need,” she said, “I don’t feel brave. I feel anguished, desperate and angry.”
“I don’t want to live in a place where my government tells me that child sex abuse victims must become mothers,” or accept that “a particular religious ideology eclipses my duty as a physician.”
“I don’t want to be the one who sends a patient away,” or be the one “who loses a patient because her pregnancy killed her before I could save her.”
