When is a child not a child?

A child is not a child when believing in her existence would force you to notice your own cruelty. When the story of a 10-year-old who had to cross state lines to end a pregnancy that was the product of rape, because the post-Roe laws in the state of Ohio are cruel enough to force birth on a child in her circumstances, is sufficiently monstrous that you want it to be unimaginable.

A child is not a child. She is a “hoax,” surely (Fox’s Jesse Watters). A “fanciful tale” in the words of the Wall Street Journal editorial board, “a story too good to confirm.” A story that “looks like a lie” (New York Post). An exaggerated concoction by pro-abortion forces designed to make you feel that your laws are inhuman, that they are vicious, that they are written by people to whom these things could never possibly happen, and therefore they are clumsy and careless in the most bruising possible way. She cannot be a child. Children are what your laws protect.

But then she is real after all. She is not a hoax. The story is true.

Then, a child is not a child simply because you are refusing to see her. Because you are trying to believe that what you were asking of her was not monstrous. In the words of the counsel for the National Right to Life, Jim Bopp, the man who should have thought about the people his words would affect as he wrote model laws for state legislatures looking to restrict abortion after Roe v. Wade, “She would have had the baby, and as many women who have had babies as a result of rape, we would hope that she would understand the reason and ultimately the benefit of having the child.”

Already, the child in this story is someone else! The 10-year-old child is not a child; she is a woman, one of “many women.” It is the fetus that is the child, now, the “baby.” The “benefit”! How convenient! How neat! How easily these words take a situation that is gruelingly, guttingly real and reduce it to a sanitary realm where there is not a victimized child anywhere to be seen. Just women (many women!) and babies and benefit.

A child is not a child when you are forcing her to give birth. She is a woman, suddenly, and the fetus is a baby. Presto, change-o! That’s not justice, it’s sleight of hand.

A child is not a child when she does exist but you cannot admit, now, that what you are forcing her to do is more than dangerous for someone in a body so young — it is monstrous. You scramble to make it sound as though a law that forces a 10-year-old assault victim to give birth is a good law, with benefits. Or that the law does not do what it says.

These are men who don’t know a child from a woman, a person from a womb on two legs, because they simply do not want to know.

This is the way they write these laws. Around actual people, and actual medicine, without a thought to the bloody and painful consequences. 

An ectopic pregnancy can be whisked elsewhere, in defiance of all medical science. If it’s a legitimate rape, the body has ways of shutting that whole thing down. Do not allow life, with all its tendency toward detail, to get in the way. Protect the children, at all costs. That 10-year-old is not a child, of course. She is a woman. The law is not for her. There are babies to consider! There are children to protect!

When is a child not a child? When you are choosing not to protect her.

But she is a child all the same.

~from WaPo, A Petri, the week of July 14 2022