CORRECTION, 7/13: This story turned out to be true. My apologies for getting it incorrect. Please see this subsequent post for the details.

Original post follows …

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This story stunk from the beginning, and it stinks more with each passing day. Last week, both Joe Biden and Kamala Harris cited the case of a 10-year-old girl who had to flee from Ohio to Indiana to get an abortion because she was six weeks and three days pregnant — three days past the limit of the state’s new abortion law, activated by the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision. Fact-checkers attempted to verify the single-sourced story and couldn’t find any evidence for it.

Neither could Ohio’s top law enforcement officer. Attorney General Dave Yost immediately began looking for any evidence that this 10-year-old girl existed anywhere except in the imagination of abortion advocates. Last night, Yost told Fox News Channel’s Jesse Watters that he hadn’t heard so much as a “whisper” about such a case — and it would have been easy to track down if it existed:

JESSE WATTERS: So how does Ohio investigating the claim that a 10-year-old girl was raped? Are we looking for the rapist on the loose? Let’s turn to Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost. So, Dave, have you had anybody come to you in your state to say we’re looking into this? A police report was filed?

DAVE YOST, OHIO ATTORNEY GENERAL (R): Not a whisper and we work closely with the centralized law enforcement system in Ohio. We have regular contact with prosecutors and local police and sheriffs. Not a whisper anywhere. Something even more telling, Jesse, is my office runs the state crime lab. Any case like this you are going to have a rape kit, you are going to have biological evidence, and you would be looking for DNA analysis, which we do most of the DNA Analysis in Ohio. There is no case request for analysis that looks anything like this.

Not only would this have been easy to track, Watters notes, it would have been a crime to hide. Doctors, including abortionists, are mandatory reporters for crimes such as child abuse, statutory rape, and so on. A pregnant 10-year-old would have been prima facie evidence of at least statutory rape. Yost notes that a case involving a child of that age would result in a mandatory life sentence — and that Ohio law enforcement and prosecutors would have champed at the bit to make sure the perpetrator never set foot outside a prison again.

And if the girl fled to Indiana? As it turns out, Indiana has a mandatory-reporting law, too. Anyone who provided medical care of any kind for a pregnant 10-year-old would either have to inform law enforcement or face prosecution. In fact, Indiana makes everyone a mandatory reporter when it comes to child abuse, not just medical or educational personnel.

And does Ohio actually have a six-week limit on abortions? Our colleague Megan Fox from PJ Media did some research and discovered that Ohio’s law restricts abortions to after a heartbeat is detected rather than impose a calendar limit. As Yost says in a longer version of the clip, the law also includes an exception for “medical emergencies,” and a pregnant 10-year-old would almost certainly qualify. That’s not the only hole in this story, which looks more and more like a lie concocted by one activist abortionist:

Nobody has been willing to corroborate the tale of the 10-year-old pregnant rape victim that Biden has been using to push his pro-abortion narrative.@MeganFoxWriter over at @PJMedia_com says this story raises major "red flags" and is "being used as a political weapon." pic.twitter.com/FNpAMAtbFP

— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) July 11, 2022

Megan had been skeptical from the outset about this claim:

🚩 #7 There's no way to verify Bernard's claim. She has doctor patient confidentiality. No one can FOIA her. The media won't ask any questions and even if they did she wouldn't answer. There is no proof that this 10-year-old even exists and yet the media ran with it full tilt.

— Megan Fox (@MeganFoxWriter) July 5, 2022

🚩 #10, #DrCaitlynBernard got a call from another doctor asking for help for a horribly abused child and her first instinct was to call the media. That should make you all stop and think for a minute. What's really going on here?

— Megan Fox (@MeganFoxWriter) July 5, 2022

“Doctor-patient confidentiality” does not trump Ohio’s mandatory-reporter law; if it did, then the mandatory-reporter law would be entirely useless. If Dr. Bernard personally knew of this girl’s situation, she was required to report it to Ohio law enforcement. If that had been done, Yost could easily have found the case and spoken about it while still keeping identities confidential. Instead, Dr. Bernard apparently only told the media about this supposed incident. And it wouldn’t have mattered anyway, since Ohio’s law is predicated on fetal cardiac activity rather than a calendar date as well as had an exception that would have covered this case.

Either this is a lie or there’s a vast conspiracy to cover up this case at the same time that the conspirators want it spread in the media. I suppose it could be the latter, but I’m betting on the former.