If abortion galvanizes Democratic turnout this fall, this will be the reason. Not Roe being overturned — that’s a serious wound to liberals, but wounds heal in time.

The thing that’ll keep them engaged is GOP legislators picking at the scab by being uncompromising on edge cases like the horror in Indiana.

I’m one of many righties who thought the story of the 10-year-old girl being forced to travel from Ohio to Indiana for an abortion seemed too terrible too soon as a post-Dobbs worst-case scenario. But even while questioning it, I noted that there would be real-world cases like it eventually and that “[p]ro-life legislators need to reckon seriously with the prospect.”

Jim Bopp of National Right to Life is drafting model legislation for states that want to ban abortion and *is* seriously reckoning with it. His answer is that pro-life means pro-life, and therefore a child in the womb shouldn’t have to pay with death for the sins of its father. That’s a principled position. But I’m guessing it would be on the short end of an 85/15 or so split among the general population when polled on the matter.

I foresee a vote on whether raped children should be forced to carry their rapists’ babies to term coming soon to the House and Senate floors.

Jim Bopp, an Indiana lawyer who authored the model legislation in advance of the Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade, told POLITICO on Thursday that his law only provides exceptions when the pregnant person’s life is in danger.

“She would have had the baby, and as many women who have had babies as a result of rape, we would hope that she would understand the reason and ultimately the benefit of having the child,” Bopp said in a phone interview on Thursday…

“Unless her life was at danger, there is no exception for rape,” Bopp said. “The [model] bill does propose exceptions for rape and incest, in my model, because that is a pro-life position, but it’s not our ideal position. We don’t think, as heartwrenching as those circumstances are, we don’t think we should devalue the life of the baby because of the sins of the father.”

Again, the pro-life case is straightforward. But the pro-choice case is straightforward too. A young child who didn’t consent, and couldn’t have lawfully consented, to sex would be compelled by the state to undergo an ordeal that even adult women find difficult. The law would extend by many months the horrendous trauma visited upon her by her attacker. God only knows what sort of physical and psychological disabilities a 10-year-old would experience while trying to carry to term.

An abortion ban with a rape exception would have permitted the girl to abort in her home state instead of having to travel, but Ohio’s six-week ban doesn’t make exceptions for rape. It does make exceptions for life endangerment or severely compromised physical health, which arguably would have protected an Ohio doctor who had performed the procedure on her. But everything depends on the word “arguably.” Two physicians might reasonably disagree on whether a heathy 10-year-old could carry to term without her health being “severely” compromised. If a prosecutor can find a doctor to testify that the girl could have given birth without major risk, does the doctor who performed an abortion on her go to prison?

That uncertainty explains why the girl was asked to travel from Ohio to Indiana. When in doubt (and there’s lots of room for doubt in these statutes), which physician would want to risk committing a felony by performing a procedure that’s probably legal?

Democrats in Congress are beginning to push post-Dobbs bills designed to force Republicans to cast uncomfortable votes against them before the midterms. Per Axios, the topics on the agenda include “nationwide contraceptive access, LGBTQ marriage and parenting rights — and even potentially long-settled precedent on interracial marriage.” If the bills pass — and some, like the interracial marriage bill, should — then Dems get to claim a victory. If the bills fail due to Republican filibusters, Dems get to spook swing voters by showing them what the GOP might be prepared to ban next if they regain Congress this fall. It already happened this afternoon:

Democratic legislation that would protect the right to travel freely from state to state to seek abortion care was blocked in the Senate on Thursday by Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.)…

“No state has banned interstate travel for adult women seeking to obtain an abortion. This seems to be just trying to inflame, to raise what-ifs,” he said.

The Freedom to Travel for Health Care Act, introduced by Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.) earlier this week, seeks to clarify the right to cross state lines to obtain reproductive health care services. It would also empower the U.S. attorney general and affected individuals to bring civil lawsuits against anyone who attempts to restrict that right…

Sen. Steve Daines (R-Mont.) claimed the bill would lead to “abortion tourism” and that it would “protect the greed of woke corporations” who have pledged to cover travel costs of their employees.

There are in fact already efforts in some red states to try to prevent pregnant women from leaving to seek abortions, whether by restricting their movements or by making abortion providers in blue states civilly liable for any terminations they perform on a red-state resident. Cortez Masto’s legislation obviously has electoral motives but she didn’t pluck a random scenario from a hypothetical parade of horribles just to make Republicans squirm. This is a live issue at the state level, enough so that Brett Kavanaugh felt obliged to address it preemptively in his Dobbs concurrence.

So the story of the raped, pregnant 10-year-old isn’t just a question of whether she should be able to get an abortion at home, it’s a question of whether she should be able to get an abortion *anywhere.* That’s also going to pick at the scab.

I haven’t seen any campaign ads locally yet about abortion, but they’re coming. I’ll leave you with this one, which was leaked this week to NBC, as a sneak preview of what the fall midterm campaign will look like on the Democratic side.