The affidavits describe more than two dozen other instances besides the 10 year-old girl ,who had been raped, in which the Ohio abortion law put women under extreme duress. The descriptions include those of three women who threatened suicide. They also include two women with cancer who couldn’t terminate their pregnancies and also couldn’t get cancer treatment while they were pregnant.
Another three examples were of women whose fetuses had severe abnormalities or other conditions that made a successful pregnancy impossible. Even so, they couldn’t get abortions in Ohio.
And in three cases, debilitating vomiting was caused by pregnancy ‒ so bad in one case that a woman couldn’t get off the clinic floor. But neither could these women get abortions in Ohio, the affidavits said.
The affidavits were filed seeking a preliminary injunction against the Ohio abortion law. They’re arguing that Ohio’s abortion law is so onerous that it violates women’s due process rights under the Ohio Constitution.
The affidavits also detail cases of fetal abnormalities and other problems so severe that pregnancies can’t result in a successful birth. One patient at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Southwest Ohio had a fetus with abnormalities including “a lack of lower extremities and the contents of the fetus’s abdomen, including possibly the heart, protruding through a defect in the abdominal wall,” Liner, a doctor, said in her sworn statement.
Another girl, 16, had vomited so much that she lost 20 pounds, Trick, of the Dayton clinic, reported. The girl’s mother didn’t have a reliable car, so she had to rent one to take her daughter to Indianapolis for an abortion, Trick said.
In 2021, Ohio’s Children’s Advocacy Centers saw 6,717 cases of sexual abuse against Ohioans between infancy and adulthood. And in 2020, the most recent year for which statistics are available, 571 girls aged 17 or younger received abortions in Ohio, according to the state department of health. Fifty-two of them — or one a week — were 14 or younger.
