The Deplorable History of the Abortion Industry’s Lies and Sexual Abuse Cover-ups
Ohio authorities have arrested an illegal immigrant for raping a 10-year-old girl, who subsequently crossed state lines to get an abortion. Numerous media outlets questioned the thinly sourced details of the original story. They were right to do so, based on abortionists’ long history of simultaneously lying about rape and concealing the sexual assault of minors.
Columbus police say Gerson Fuentes, a 27-year-old illegal alien from Guatemala, admitted through an interpreter that he raped the child at least twice. At his arraignment Wednesday morning, Franklin County Municipal Court Judge Cynthia Ebner set Fuentes’s bond at $2 million for rape, a first-degree felony. “We rejoice anytime a child rapist is taken off the streets,” said Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost (R) on Wednesday. “My heart aches for the pain suffered by this young child,” he added. “I am grateful for the diligent work of the Columbus Police Department in securing a confession and getting a rapist off the street.” Authorities confirmed the child had a medical abortion in Indiana on June 30.
On Tuesday, The Washington Stand reported that Yost had questioned the story, which originated with only one source: the abortionist, Caitlin Bernard (who was less-than-forthcoming about details). Yost told Fox News’s Jesse Watters on July 11 that, although “we have regular contact” with “local police,” there was “not a whisper” of a prepubescent rape case in the state. Nor had anyone contacted his office to process DNA evidence. He would later say he could not find one “scintilla of evidence” to verify the report.
Questions about the veracity of the rape extended beyond Yost. PJ Media, the Wall Street Journal, Fox News, The Washington Post, The Daily Mail, Snopes.com (which later revised its original post), The Daily Caller, The Daily Wire, Cathy Young of The Bulwark, the New York Post, and both sides of the abortion debate in Ohio sought additional evidence about the story.
The Washington Post “contacted child services agencies in some of Ohio’s most populous cities,” including Columbus, but “[n]one of the officials we reached were aware of such a case.” It’s not clear whether police concealed the case from both Yost and the Post, but the Columbus Dispatch reports it was already well underway. Franklin County Children Services alerted Columbus police to the rape on June 22, although arrest records show police did not arrest Fuentes until July 12.
Add the fact that Bernard’s Indiana has a complicated history of hiding underage sexual abuse. Abortionists there failed to report between 58% and 75% of the abortions carried out on girls under the age of 14 to state authorities in the manner required by state law, according to a 2013 analysis from the South Bend Tribune. In 2018, Indiana Right to Life named Bernard as one of nine abortionists who violated the reporting law. “All of these details, they reek of politicization of the case,” said Victor Davis Hanson on Fox News Wednesday night. “Believe nothing at first: Maybe that’s the takeaway,” replied Tucker Carlson. That’s an especially wise guideline when hearing any story about abortion.
We make no apologies for not taking the abortion industry at its word. After more than five decades of lies and politically motivated prevarications, they have more than earned Americans’ skepticism.
- The Supreme Court case that invented the constitutional “right” to abortion, Roe v. Wade, began with a lie. Norma McCorvey, the “Jane Roe” of the case, testified to the Senate Subcommittee on the Constitution, Federalism and Property Rights in 1998:
The affidavit submitted to the Supreme Court didn’t happen the way I said it did, pure and simple. I lied! [Her lawyers] Sarah Weddington and Linda Coffey needed an extreme case to make their client look pitiable. Rape seemed to be the ticket. What made rape even worse? A gang rape!
- A former abortion facility volunteer named Andrea Abrams reported that her facility routinely claimed poor women’s abortions were necessary for “mental health” in order to obtain Medicaid funding. When the law restricted abortion funding to cases of rape or incest, “it was instantly apparent that the counselor could tell women about the Medicaid restrictions in a way that would suggest to the woman that she could claim to have been raped, thereby qualifying for medical assistance coverage,” she wrote. “I spoke with one or two women who immediately said that they had been raped. Others were not as quick to pick up the possibility, or too honest to do so.” Since she had volunteered at a rape center, she felt her ethical code forced to give up the abortion facility’s rape charade;
- “A time and place can be envisioned where a woman, her doctor, and sympathetic authorities would be forced to go through a charade of a rape complaint about some unknown, unidentifiable assailant in order to get around hypocritical, restrictive laws” against abortion, wrote self-abortion pioneer Carol Downer and feminist attorney Rebecca Chalker in their 1992 book “A Woman’s Book of Choices”; and
- Abortion extremist Amanda Marcotte wrote in Slate that “the American public will forgive aborting a rape-caused pregnancy but would never forgive someone who rebels against the expectation that she must have children with her husband,” so a woman in that position “pretty much has to lie” and claim she had been raped.
Abortionists not only fabricate rape, they obscure it from authorities, too. In 2008, a Planned Parenthood employee explained to an undercover investigator posing as a 13-year-old patient how to lie about being impregnated by her 31-year-old “boyfriend.” In all, Live Action found eight abortion facilities willing to cover up statutory rape and underage sexual abuse. Years later, Live Action discovered seven abortion facilities that would hide child sex trafficking.
But concerns that abortionists would hush up about such behavior are, sadly, far from theoretical. Although Planned Parenthood, as a Title X recipient, is a mandatory reporter, its long history of reportedly concealing rape, incest, and sexual abuse includes:
- George Savanah, a Washington state resident who raped his own daughter for years and subjected her to three abortions to hide the evidence. Savanah impregnated the minor three times, when she was 14, 16, and 17. Each time, he took her to Planned Parenthood for an abortion; each time, the incestuous abuse continued because — in the court’s words — “[n]o one else knew” about the pregnancies except Planned Parenthood, which kept Savanah’s secrets safe. A jury convicted Savanah of “two counts of third-degree rape of a child and two counts of first degree incest”;
- Timothy David Smith entered a guilty plea to multiple charges that he had sexually abused his stepdaughter. Smith had been abusing the girl for seven years by the time he got her pregnant at age 13. On May 2, 2012, he took the minor to a Colorado Planned Parenthood, where he told her to have an abortion and pressured her to receive a long-acting contraceptive shot against her will. Despite the suspicious behavior, court records say not one of the four Planned Parenthood employees who observed the two “spoke to [the victim] about sexual abuse, physical abuse, her relationship with Smith, or any other personal details.” Nor had they “ever contacted law enforcement, child services, or any other agency to report any suspicion of child sexual abuse as is required under Colorado law.” They simply released her on her own. (Smith had left the facilities during the abortion to eat lunch.);
- A Planned Parenthood in southwestern Ohio settled a case brought by Denise Fairbanks, who said her father began raping her at age 13, and three years later took her to Planned Parenthood for an abortion. Since Planned Parenthood did not report the assault, her father continued the incestuous abuse for another year-and-a-half, until her basketball coach notified authorities, according to Life Legal Defense Foundation;
- John Haller, a 21-year-old soccer coach, began abusing a 13-year-old eighth grader in 2003, getting her pregnant shortly after she turned 14. He took her to Planned Parenthood for an abortion, posing as both her stepbrother and her father to authorize the abortion. Planned Parenthood sued all the way to the state Supreme Court to deny her parents the right to view redacted medical records, which could prove the facility never contacted authorities and possibly engaged in a pattern of concealing minors’ sexual assaults;
- For at least three years, 18-year-old Tyler Kost of Arizona reportedly assaulted 13 girls, as young as 12. When a 15-year-old girl went to Planned Parenthood, abortion workers reportedly falsified documents to cover up the abuse, because it inconvenienced them. “The counselor intentionally miscoded the assault as a consensual encounter,” according to a report from the Pinal Sheriff’s Office. “The counselor told them they did not want the hassle of having to report the assault to law enforcement, as they were a mandatory reporter.” Four other girls said Kost victimized them after the Planned Parenthood visit. Kost escaped with three years in jail plus probation after a plea bargain.
These are just a handful of the many, many known instances of sexual assault victims receiving nothing from Planned Parenthood but an abortion and a medical bill.
The abortion industry even supports the crime that led to this tragic rape: illegal immigration. Planned Parenthood has shown its solidarity with the Left by adopting an immigration statement calling for “a permanent policy that eliminates the fear of deportation, and which allows both equal opportunity to access health care and full legal presence in the U.S. on a path to legalization.” Once again, the Democrats have become part of amnesty and abortion.
Before Roe v. Wade was overturned, the abortion industry covered up underage sexual abuse, because it maximized the number of abortions it could carry out. Immediately after the case’s reversal, an abortionist apparently told the truth about one incident of underage sexual abuse in order to dissuade Indiana lawmakers from instituting a heartbeat law like Ohio’s; that is, she thought disclosing the abuse would maximize the number of abortions she could carry out. The abortion industry’s kaleidoscopic, ever-changing relationship with the truth revolves entirely around its ever-present pursuit of self-interest.
This publication will follow the facts wherever they lead, confident that the overwhelming wave of facts will bear out our views. We acknowledge the tragedy in this case. We mourn the pain of rape, the loss of childhood innocence, the intransigence on the border that led to the rape, and the exploitation of her pain as a lobbying device. We will never cease to question the prevailing party line of abortion industry spokespeople and their legacy media scribes. As the track records of both professions have shown, they richly deserve it. And you, our readers, deserve nothing less from a publication that follows the One Who is Truth.
Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.