If the United States was a country that valued women and girls, or that understood the moral gravity of misogyny, then there would be statues to people like Caitlin Bernard. The Indiana doctor has long been a champion of reproductive rights; she joined a 2019 lawsuit challenging her state’s Roe-era ban on dilation and evacuation abortions, or D&E procedures; she’s long been outspoken, in her very red state, about her faith that women and girls are worthy of control over their own bodies. So maybe Indiana Republicans, like the attorney general Todd Rokita, already thought of her as an enemy in July 2022, when, just days after the supreme court’s Dobbs decision overturned Roe and threw an anti-abortion trigger ban into effect in neighboring Ohio, Bernard performed an abortion on a patient who had had to travel to Indiana to get her procedure: a 10-year-old girl, the victim of rape.
This act alone – Bernard’s gesture of compassion and respect to an abused child, one that spared the young girl the danger and torture of an underage, rape-produced pregnancy and helped to end the suffering and indignity that followed her assault, is itself a solemn kind of service. Bernard’s work brought her into the darkest realities of what men do to women – raping and impregnating them as children, making laws that will keep them pregnant against their will, as children, unless they can flee – and to face that darkness with integrity and courage. Few of us would have the capacity to do what Bernard did in treating that child; few of us would be able to face that truth about our world.
Fewer still would survive what came next: Bernard became the target of a large-scale, coordinated campaign of hate, intimidation and professional harassment, coordinated by Republican officials in her state government, in retaliation for her pro-choice speech.
In July 2022, outraged and hurt on behalf of her young patient, Bernard gave an account of the abortion to the Indianapolis Star, concealing the girl’s identity, in order to illustrate the brutality of abortion bans. The case garnered national attention; President Biden mentioned it at the signing of an executive order on abortion access. Bernard’s account offered a stark illustration of the new order that the Dobbs ruling had ushered in: a regime of sexist cruelty that continues to grip a greater and greater number of states and which does not grant mercy even to the most vulnerable.
But this was a reality that the Republican party did not want the public to see. Almost immediately after the story broke, party officials tried to deny it. Ohio’s Republican attorney general, Dave Yost, spoke to USA Today and claimed that the child never even existed, saying that there was “not a damn scintilla of evidence” that his state’s abortion ban had forced a raped girl to flee. When it became clear that simply denying the child’s existence would not work (a 27-year-old Ohio man has since received a life sentence for his crimes), Republicans pivoted to an attack on Bernard herself. Rokita, the attorney general of Bernard’s home state, went on TV to swear revenge against her. “We’re gathering evidence as we speak and we’re going to fight this to the end,” Rokita said of the physician.
What followed was a year-long campaign of harassment and intimidation by Rokita, who, with the backing of Indiana Republicans and using his government powers, sought to make an example of Bernard so as to intimidate other abortion providers and pro-choice Hoosiers from speaking out.
In addition to appearing on Fox News to target Bernard – an event that she says led to harassment and threats against her – Rokita harassed Bernard for months, demanding records to prove that she had not reported the rape in accordance with state law (she had) and eventually dragging her before the state’s medical licensing board, in an attempt to have her ability to practice medicine revoked. But not even that board, which is staffed with Rokita’s political allies, could substantiate his claims of wrongdoing by the doctor. Unable to have her license revoked, Rokita settled for punishing her symbolically: at the end of his year of harassment and abuse of his office in order to target Bernard, Rokita had the licensing board fine her $3,000, allegedly for violating the girl’s privacy.
If the notion that Rokita, a man who wants abortion policy to be able to pry into the uterus of a little girl, sincerely cares about patient privacy seems suspicious to you, that’s because the privacy fine was always a pretext for the ordeal’s real purpose: retribution, harassment and intimidation of a valuable and politically effective pro-choice voice. It was a case of a government official using government powers to punish truthful statements made in the public interest, because he did not like the political content of those statements. It was a chilling violation of the spirit of free speech.
Free speech has become politicized in America, a rhetorical tick used to shield huge swaths of rightwing speech and conduct from social sanction or legal review. To read most pundits, you’d think that a free speech violation was something that happened only when a tenured professor got yelled at for embracing race science; if you ask the supreme court, a free speech violation is what happens when a business is required by law to serve gay couples the same way it serves straight ones. But the right is increasingly mounting its own attacks on freedom of expression and they are targeting those who espouse gender liberation – especially feminists.
Bernard’s case is an extreme example, but it is on a spectrum of harassment, intimidation and legal ambiguity orchestrated by the anti-abortion movement to stifle one of the most prized American freedoms: freedom of speech. Anti-abortion politicians and the laws they write have made vast swaths of speech impossibly dangerous – for abortion providers, like Bernard, for patients, their loved ones and the network of pro-choice activists who work to assist them. “Aiding and abetting” clauses in many state abortion bans are so imprecisely defined that many abortion patients feel they cannot tell their loved ones that they are travelling for care, or cannot ask them for help paying for the trip or the procedure.
In Texas, doctors are “speaking in code” to their patients about leaving the state for abortions – frightened not just out of performing the procedures, but out of giving true, medically useful information about them. The extremism of the anti-abortion movement has not just eliminated women’s freedom of choice; it is increasingly curtailing their freedom of speech, too. Their aim is clear: they don’t just want to make abortion inaccessible. They want to make it unspeakable.
Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist