When Truth Doesn’t Matter Anymore
In the wake of the Supreme Court’s Roe decision, a story was passed around about a 10 year old girl from Ohio who was impregnated and had to go to Indiana to have an abortion because it would have been a criminal offense in her home state.
I get it. It sounds too pat to be true. I certainly am skeptical when I see this sort of thing passed around on social media. I chose not to share it. So many things show up on Twitter that I’m picky. If I’d thought about sharing it, I would have done a few minutes worth of research .
The Wall Street Journal, a slew of right wing media outlets, and Ohio Congressman Jim Jordan all denounced the story as fake..
The WSJ ran an editorial citing “PJ Media,” a notorious right wing propaganda site saying that no such person existed. The paper said “no one will identify” the victim. Who publishes the names of rape victims? I suppose they wanted her home address so she could get hate mail from manosphere cranks.
The problem was that the story turned out to be true.
From the Columbus Dispatch:
Gershon Fuentes, 27, whose last known address was an apartment on Columbus' Northwest Side, was arrested Tuesday after police say he confessed to raping the child on at least two occasions. He's since been charged with rape, a felony of the first degree in Ohio.
Columbus police were made aware of the girl's pregnancy through a referral by Franklin County Children Services that was made by her mother on June 22, Det. Jeffrey Huhn testified Wednesday morning at Fuentes' arraignment. On June 30, the girl underwent a medical abortion in Indianapolis, Huhn said.
So now the problem, according to PJ Media, is that the criminal justice system was slow to document the girl’s case. Congratulations, I say, welcome to the world of crime victim frustration.
There were possibly issues with the original story, which appeared as an anecdote in a larger story in the Indianapolis Star, but only had one (credible) named source. The Washington Post fact checker was taken aback because no law enforcement source confirmed the story. (If law enforcement is the gold standard for fact checking, we’re all in trouble. )
Still, there was no basis other than a bunch of right-wing blowhards to say the 10 year old in question didn’t exist.
The article said that three days after the June 24 court ruling, an Indianapolis obstetrician-gynecologist, Caitlan Bernard, who performs abortions, received a call from “a child abuse doctor” in Ohio who had a 10-year-old patient who was six weeks and three days pregnant. Unable to obtain an abortion in Ohio, “the girl soon was on her way to Indiana to Bernard’s care,” the Star reported.
Additionally, it appears that arrestee Fuentes is undocumented. And you know what that means: he’s probably one of the rapists Mexico is sending over the border.
Now the Indiana AG is going after the doctor. Because no good deed goes unpunished in MAGA-land.
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Meanwhile, in Nashville, a reporter bought into the Law Enforcement narrative that even touching Fentanyl can cause an overdose.
Police responded to the hospital on Sunday. A spokesperson told WSMV that officers did not see any sort of residue on the dollar bill, but it was not tested for fentanyl since no one is being charged.
Police are still going to destroy the dollar bill.
Last month, the Perry County Sheriff’s Office said there were two separate incidents in which meth and fentanyl were found in folded dollar bills on a gas station floor. Police said this is not an issue they are seeing in Nashville.
Last August, the San Diego Sheriff's Department was busted for publicizing a video purporting to show a “fentanyl overdose,” suffered by Deputy David Faiivae a month earlier while on duty.
The story was written about in the San Diego Union-Tribune (and re-published in its sister publication, the Los Angeles Times), the department’s video was spread through television news affiliates. (h/t TruthOrFiction.com)
The problem here is that the science doesn’t match up with the story. You can’t overdose or even get high from touching the drug which is –when snorted, smoked, or injected– responsible for an ever increasing number of overdoses. Mexican cartels are adding the substance to other drugs because it’s cheap to make and covers up otherwise diluted products.
“If you could absorb drugs by touching them, why would people bother to inject them?” medical toxicologist Dr. Andrew Stolbach told the Detroit Free Press in 2018. “Drugs like fentanyl and analogs of fentanyl aren’t absorbed through the skin very well at all. So brief, incidental contact isn’t going to cause somebody to absorb a therapeutic dose, let alone a toxic dose.”
That same year, the American Medical Association approved a resolution geared toward developing more materials to combat disinformation around fentanyl that specifically criticizes “multiple media reports of police officers and firefighters falling ill, reportedly due to brief dermal exposure to an unknown white substance, which often leads to symptoms of panic and self-administration of intranasal naloxone, has misrepresented the science behind fentanyl while increasing paranoia among the lay public.”
So, why are some law enforcement agencies prone to repeating these claims?
It’s all part of the “War on Drugs” used to justify increased militarization and surveillance. Does anybody remember Reefer Madness, the film used by churches to reinforce the prohibition on marijuana?
Email me at WritetoDougPorter@gmail.com