A Kentucky lawmaker has introduced a bill that would allow a rape and incest exception to the state’s law protecting preborn children from abortion.
Nearly all preborn children have been protected from abortion in the state since August 2022, when Kentucky’s trigger law was allowed to go into effect. Now, Senator David Yates has filed Senate Bill 99, legislation that would allow abortions in the cases of rape and incest, as well as in instances where, according to the Courier-Journal, “maternal health was in question” and the preborn child is diagnosed with a “lethal fetal anomaly or the fetus is incompatible with sustained life outside the womb.”
Yates has called the bill “Hadley’s Law,” after Hadley Duvall, a college student who was raped and impregnated by her stepfather as a child. Duvall ended up miscarrying but has used her story to claim that abortion should be available in these rare situations.
“Those survivors — those women, even little girls, who were put through that, that choice was removed from them, who were violated — should not be continued to be violated by the state,” Yates said. “The commonwealth of Kentucky should not remove that choice. It should not continue to victimize those survivors.”
READ: Conceived in rape, man shares gratitude for his birth mother’s decision for life
Though advocates of rape and incest exceptions say that these exceptions are necessary for the well-being of women who have been violated, abortion is an evil that is never therapeutic, because it violently ends the life of the innocent preborn child in the womb. Sexual assault is traumatic for the victim; abortion does not erase that trauma, but instead, may compound it.
Live Action has featured many individuals who were affected in one way or another by abortion after rape. The video series Can’t Stay Silent featured a woman named Serena, who was impregnated at 13 after being raped by her uncle. Serena says the abortion that followed didn’t undo the trauma of her sexual assault – instead, it tore apart her family and affected her life forever. Hers is just one of many stories of women who report feeling shame and remorse after abortion, even after rape.
Along with stories of regret are the positive testimonies of those who chose life for their child after rape. Though she was raped at age 12, Lianna Rebolledo chose life for her daughter, acknowledging that she knew abortion would just be a “double rape.” And although Steventhen Holland’s mother had no support and was intensely pressured to abort him after she was raped, she too chose life. Holland recently told Live Action, “She is absolutely my hero.”
