This is what it means to rape a 10-year-old

The Indianapolis Star reported this month that an Ohio girl who had recently turned 10 traveled to Indiana to receive an abortion. She was six weeks and three days along when her pregnancy was confirmed. Ohio had just banned abortion after doctors can detect fetal cardiac activity, which can happen as early as six weeks. On Wednesday, the Columbus Dispatch reported that a suspect had been arrested and charged with raping the child after confessing to attacking her at least twice.

It’s impossible to take in the full gravity of this story without thinking carefully about how young a 10-year-old is.

Ten-year-olds are of an age when Dr. Benjamin Spock said children are finally prepared “to cross a heavily traveled street without adult supervision.” The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s childhood development guidelines for children this age emphasize that they are still learning to build deep friendships and understand concepts such as responsibility.

They are usually in fourth or fifth grade, depending on when their birthdays fall, and they are being assessed on concepts such as reading comprehension and fractions. They’re at the right age for Pixar movies, but not for Marvel action extravaganzas; they can handle Amelia Bedelia and Willy Wonka and maybe the later Harry Potter books.

Gift guides for 10-year-olds recommend STEM learning toys and plush comfort animals. Ames’s research suggested that 10-year-olds are still learning to tell jokes; that they’re prone to losing or frittering away money; that they think dating is something for the future.

As the CDC noted in a 2020 health statistics report, only 10 percent of girls and women between the ages of 15 and 44 in the years 2013 to 2017 had their first period by age 10. Ten-year-olds may not even be entirely sure how sex and pregnancy work. If they live in one of the 30 states that mandate sex education (along with the District of Columbia), they may be too young to receive those classes. Only 22 states mandate that such education be “medically, factually or technically accurate.”

A healthy 10-year-old girl is between 50 and 59 inches tall, and weighs 54 to 106 pounds; at 18, the range is 60 to 68.5 inches and 100 to 178 pounds. An adult woman with a healthy body mass index might be expected to gain between 25 and 35 pounds over the course of her pregnancy.

The mind revolts at the horror of a raped and pregnant 10-year-old.

For abortion rights advocates, including President Biden, this story became an immediate example of the dangers of a post-Roe v. Wade world. Then there were the skeptics. The charitable reading of those who questioned the anecdote is that it was so awful they simply didn’t want to believe it could be true — and that they were wary because the Indianapolis Star had cited only a single source.

Not all doubters deserve such credit, however. Ohio Attorney General David Yost (R) surely had better things to do than going on a media tour to suggest it was “likely” this monstrous crime against a child had not taken place.

Let’s not forget, too, that the political moment guaranteeing that this atrocity would become a national talking point enabled a different kind of infringement on childhood.

To a certain extent, I understand why Caitlin Bernard — the Indianapolis obstetrician and gynecologist who was consulted about the child’s care and brought her story to national attention — spoke out. Anecdotes such as these are galvanizing, and pro-choice advocates rightly fear that the post-Dobbs world could be even crueler than the pre-Roe one. (I have much less sympathy for people who attacked the story less out of an interest in journalistic integrity, or hope that there is a limit to the world’s barbarity, than out of a desire to tear down advocates for girls and women.)

Yet even if the girl in Ohio remains anonymous — and the national media attention, the arrest of her alleged rapist and his naming in the press make that seem unlikely — she will someday know that her 10-year-old self was treated not as a person the whole nation had an interest in protecting, but as a political chess piece.

There’s nobody nicer than a 10-year-old. And no greater shame than a nation that put a 10-year-old in the worst possible circumstances through an unnecessary ordeal, and then argued about whether she was a hoax.