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A state legislative committee in Louisiana has blocked the advancement of a bill that was designed to allow young people who are pregnant as the result of rape or incest to obtain abortions.
Louisiana has a near-total ban on abortion, only allowing the procedure in instances where a pregnant person’s life is at risk — exceptions that are rarely implemented in practice due to providers’ fears of facing prosecution from the state. House Bill 164 sought to implement limited changes to the state’s law by allowing victims of rape or incest under the age of 17 to get abortions.
But the House Committee on Criminal Justice voted 7-4 against the measure, with all opposing votes coming from Republican lawmakers, some of whom tried to justify their votes by claiming they were protecting the “innocence” of fetuses.
“That baby [in the womb] is innocent … We have to hang on to that,” GOP state Rep. Dodie Horton said.
Other Republicans justified their votes by claiming that teenagers might lie about being sexually assaulted in order to get an abortion.
Democrats condemned their Republican colleagues for voting to further victimize children who have been sexually assaulted.
“This bill now is focused on children,” the legislation’s author Rep. Delisha Boyd (D) said.
Rep. Alonzo Knox (D) lambasted Republicans for voting against the measure, saying:
It’s disgusting to me that we have a society where we can’t make exceptions in a situation where a young girl’s innocence has been taken away in the most vile way… and now she’s impregnated and somebody, somewhere, wants to force a nine, 10, 11, 12, 13-year-old child to have a baby for the monster that took away her innocence?
Witnesses who testified in favor of the bill, including health care providers, shared their horrifying experiences of having to force children to go through the birthing process after they became pregnant due to rape or incest. OB-GYN Neelima Sukhavasi testified that she and her colleagues have delivered numerous babies of children who have been the victims of sexual assault.
“One of these teenagers delivered a baby while clutching a Teddy Bear — and that’s an image that once you see that, you can’t unsee it,” Sukhavasi said.
Twenty states in the U.S. are currently enforcing near-total abortion bans or early gestational limits on abortion. Of those states, 10 make no exceptions for rape or incest.
Since the overturn of Roe v. Wade, which had upheld federal protections for abortion from 1973 to 2022, there have been an estimated 64,000 pregnancies resulting from rape or incest in states with abortion bans, according to one JAMA study.
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