Louisiana lawmakers reject adding exceptions for some rape cases to abortion ban

BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) — For the third consecutive year, Louisiana lawmakers rejected a bill that would have allowed young victims of rape to get an abortion.

In an emotional and religious-laced legislative committee meeting on Tuesday legislators objected to adding rape, in cases where the girl is under the age of 17 and impregnated as a result of the sexual offense, to the narrow list of exceptions for one of the strictest abortion bans in the country.

“If we’re truly pro-life, we should also be fighting for the life of those children who are raped and molested,” said the author of the bill, Democratic Rep. Delisha Boyd, who argued that under Louisiana’s current law young victims of rape are forced to carry babies to term.

Among those who opposed the proposed exception was Democratic Rep. Patricia Moore, who spoke publicly about being conceived after her mother was raped as a young teenager. While speaking against the bill, Moore discussed her religious beliefs and said she has struggled with her decision on the measure. Even ahead of the meeting she said she asked God to “show me something in the Bible that can address this.”

Moore said in the area of Louisiana that she represents, she is aware of a nine-year-old who is pregnant; “I’m struggling because life and death, according to our Heavenly Father it’s in his hands. I’m like, ‘God are you wanting this child… to have a baby? What good can come out of this?’”

“I know we got to protect our children, but to this point right now, I cannot vote ‘Yes’ because I’m constantly hearing that God would take a bad situation and turn it into good,” Moore said.

Like Moore, Boyd has publicly shared that she was born after her mother was raped as a teen. Boyd was born in 1969, four years before abortion became legal under the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark Roe v. Wade ruling.

More than five decades later, rape survivors in Louisiana who become pregnant find themselves in a similar situation to Boyd’s mother: forced to carry the baby to term in a state that has one of the country’s highest maternal mortality rates, or to travel to another state where abortion is still legal.

Boyd said while she is grateful to be here, her mother and Moore’s mother did not a have a choice to get an abortion in Louisiana.

“I know the Bible. But I also know God gives people the ability to do right and wrong,” Boyd said, urging her lawmakers to give victims of rape and their families the ability to choose if they get an abortion in Louisiana.

The bill failed 3-9, with two Democrats siding with Republicans on the committee.

In the reliably red state of Louisiana, which is firmly ensconced in the Bible Belt and where even some Democrats oppose abortions, adding exceptions to the near-total abortion ban has been an ongoing battle for advocates — with similar measures failing the last few years. Currently, of the 12 states enforcing abortion bans at all stages of pregnancy, four have exceptions in cases of rape.

A study released by the Journal of the American Medical Association found that between July 2022 and January 2024, there were more than 64,000 pregnancies resulting from rape in states where abortion has been banned in all or most cases.

Louisiana’s abortion law went into effect in 2022 following the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that overturned Roe v. Wade, ending a half-century of the nationwide right to abortion. The only exceptions to the ban are if there is substantial risk of death or impairment to the mother if she continues the pregnancy or in the case of “medically futile” pregnancies — when the fetus has a fatal abnormality.