A 10-year-old girl is not your point to be scored
A 10-year-old girl is not your point to be scored
When politics makes us forget people
“I love humanity . . . but I can’t help being surprised at myself: the more I love humanity in general, the less I love men in particular, I mean, separately, as separate individuals.”
So it turns out the story about the 10-year-old girl who needed an abortion is real after all:
COLUMBUS, Ohio – A man was charged with impregnating a 10-year-old Ohio girl whose travel to Indiana to seek an abortion led to international attention and became a flashpoint in the national furor over the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade.
The story had become a “flashpoint” because liberals used it to illustrate the evils of the new abortion bans and because conservatives thought it wasn’t actually true.
The Wall Street Journal called it “an abortion story too good to confirm”:
The tale is a potent post-Roe tale of woe for those who want to make abortion a voting issue this fall. One problem: There’s no evidence the girl exists. PJ Media’s Megan Fox was first to point this out, and so far no one has been able to identify the girl or where she lives.
But she does exist. And now, instead of conservatives gleefully lambasting liberals for making stuff up, we have liberals gleefully lambasting conservatives for another round of disinformation.
I could talk more about who is right and who is wrong here, but I’m not going to do that. (Except, maybe, to suggest you take Damon Linker’s advice on sorting through what’s misinformation and what’s not.) Instead, I want to talk a little bit about what seems to be missing from all the fighting.
That is, the 10-year-old girl herself.
She’s ostensibly the center of all our concern in this particular debate, and yet — possibly because we don’t know her, can’t put a face to her, and the reasons for that are fine with me — she seems in our discourse to be something other than a child who has been through shocking, horrifying trauma.
Instead, she’s mostly serving as an object lesson for whatever point we want to make.
Earlier this week, WaPo’s Greg Sargent interviewed Rachel Kleinfeld, a specialist in political conflict, about the violence we seem to moving toward as a country. This stood out to me:
Kleinfeld: One of the things we know about other countries that descend into greater political violence is that violence is preceded by a dehumanization phase. America is well along in that phase: things like misogyny, racial epithets, calling Democrats “groomers” and comparing them to pedophiles.
The next stage is making violence against those dehumanized opponents seem more normal. You’re starting to see GOP candidates posing with rifles — everything from Rep. Thomas Massie’s family Christmas photo to Eric Greitens’s new ads about hunting RINOs.
Kleinfeld doesn’t say this in the interview, but it seems to me that that part of the dehumanization process can be simply forgetting about the flesh-and-blood lives and concerns and needs and hurts of the people we’re supposedly rushing to defend. Somewhere out there is a young girl — barely more than a baby herself — who has been through a hell I don’t want to imagine. She’s barely begun to heal, if that’s even the case. And she’ll live with that trauma the rest of her life.
God help her.
She is not a point to be scored.
I understand why her story has become so central to our argument right now. Indeed, I can’t imagine trying to have this debate without telling that story, to the limited extent we can. It’s a vital fact. But also we need to make a moment, in our constant raging, to sit quietly and soberly with the reality of this particular girl. To grieve for her, even.
Otherwise this is all a game. And it’s not a game. She is not a game.