A 13-year-old girl in Mississippi gave birth this month after she was raped this past fall. She starts seventh grade in a few weeks.
The girl, who is Black, was raped while filming a TikTok video in the yard of her family’s house in Clarksdale, while her relatives were inside. According to what her mother said to Time, “a man came down the street and into the front yard, grabbed Ashley, and covered her mouth…He pulled her around to the side of the house and raped her” and that the “assailant was an adult, and that she didn’t know him. Nobody else witnessed the assault.”
Even though a police report was filed, and the family gave the name of a possible suspect, little has been done for the girl’s case. Police only collected a DNA sample from the newborn child after Time made multiple inquiries. Time reported that Clarksdale Police Chief Vincent Ramirez said regarding the delay: “It’s a pretty high priority, as a juvenile…sometimes they slip a little bit because we’ve got a lot going on, but then they come back to it.”
When the pregnancy was first discovered at an emergency room earlier this year, the girl’s mother told Time magazine that a nurse reportedly asked her child, “What have you been doing?”
The victim was unable to receive an abortion due to the porous abortion access in the South after the fall of Roe v. Wade. The closest abortion provider was in Chicago. “I don’t have the funds for all this,” the girl’s mother told Time. The trip would require money for gas, lodging, the procedure itself, and food.
There are approximately 2 million people of reproductive age who live in a US county without abortion or maternity care access, according to analysis from ABC News and Boston’s Children’s Hospital.
