Louisiana Republicans have refused to add exceptions for rape and incest to one of the strictest anti-abortion laws in the country after the US Supreme Court revoked a constitutional right to abortion access.
The state’s anti-abortion Democratic Governor John Bel Edwards opposed the exclusion, but he signed the state’s anti-abortion law last year despite pleas from abortion rights advocates to veto the measure.
This year, state Rep Delisha Boyd introduced a bill that would amend the law to add exceptions for pregnancies from rape or incest, but lawmakers on a state House committee voted down the proposal, effectively killing it for the remainder of the legislative session.
On 10 May, the committee struck down the bill after hearing testimony from rape survivors and abortion rights advocates who shared their experience and urged lawmakers to support survivors. Lawmakers voted 10-5 on party lines to keep exemptions from rape or incest out of Louisiana’s anti-abortion law.
Lawmakers also heard from anti-abortion activists and John Raymond, a former Survivor contestant and pastor accused of taping students’ mouths shut and hanging another student by his ankles.
Mr Raymond, who has pleaded not guilty to the allegations, told the committee that women will “clamor to put old boyfriends behind bars in order to dispense with the inconvenience of giving birth” if the state allows rape survivors to access abortion care.
In this year’s legislative session, lawmakers are considering a package of bills aimed at loosening the state’s near-total ban on legal abortion care, but most of the proposals have been shelved.
During the committee hearing, Ms Boyd revealed that she was born after her mother was sexually assaulted when she was 15 years old. “My mother never recovered,” she said. “No one looked after my mother. No one looked out for me.”
Republican state Rep Tony Bacala said he opposed the legislation by pointing to Ms Boyd, who was born from rape, as a good person.
In a statement, the governor said he was “deeply disappointed” by the vote.
“The committee’s decision to prevent this important bill from being debated by the full House is both unfortunate and contrary to the position of a vast majority of Louisianans, who support these exceptions,” he added.
“I simply do not understand how we as a state can tell any victim that she must be forced by law to carry her rapist’s baby to term, regardless of the impact on her own physical or mental health, the wishes of her parents, or the medical judgment of her physician,” said the anti-abortion Democratic governor, who signed the law that bans nearly all abortions, without exceptions, last year, despite pleas from abortion rights advocates to veto the bill.
“As I have said before, rape and incest exceptions protect crime victims,” he added.
Roughly 3 million women in the US have experienced rape-related pregnancy during their lifetime, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Louisiana also had one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the nation, disproportionately impacting Black women, according to the state’s Department of Health.
Louisiana is among more than a dozen states, mostly in the South, that have effectively outlawed or severely restricted access to abortion care in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision last year to reverse the half-century precedent for abortion access affirmed by Roe v Wade.
The state also is central to a closely watched case that could determine the future of a widely used abortion drug used in more than half of all abortions in the US.
The legal case over the federal government’s approval of mifepristone will return to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans on 17 May, the next step in one of the biggest abortion rights cases after the fall of Roe.
The Supreme Court’s decision on 21 April maintains the US Food and Drug Administration’s approval of the drug after a federal judge in Texas struck it down in a ruling that would have profound and potentially dangerous consequences for millions of Americans if allowed to go into effect.
A three-judge panel at the federal appeals court in Louisiana will hear arguments in the case next week.
