Every Day

A tiny, tiny minority of the horrors of the post-Roe medical reality for women will ever make news, or certainly national news, and the Right and their mainstream enablers like Kessler will be there to check the kitchen counters every time.

After an arrest was made on Wednesday, those who scrutinized the story doubled down on their previous skepticism, arguing there was no way to have known if the account was true without confirmation from state officials or police. The fact that the doctor who performed the girl’s abortion was on the record seemed to carry no weight, nor did widely-available statistics showing that most rapes go unreported, or the idea that an abused minor might have privacy protections in place.

It’s clear that traditional journalism—and male reporters, in particular—are not ready for the complicated stories that will come out of states where abortion is illegal. Consider The Washington Post’s fact-checking columnist Glenn Kessler, who defended his piece by calling the abortion provider an “activist on one side of the debate.” Why would a police officer’s account, or a state official’s, be more reliable than a doctor’s? Are we to believe that in a state where abortion is criminalized, law enforcement and government officials are objective?