Written by Sarah Ladd for Kentucky Lantern
Calling Kentucky’s near-total abortion ban “dangerous” and “cruel,” Sen. David Yates, D-Louisville, said Tuesday he will introduce a bill to add exceptions for rape and incest.
Speaking to Renee Shaw on KET’s Kentucky Tonight Monday, Senate President Robert Stivers said the bill “will be assigned to a committee.”
In 2023, a Republican-backed bill aiming to add the same exceptions got stuck in the Committee on Committees and did not advance.
This bill is named after Hadley Duvall, who appeared in campaign ads for Gov. Andy Beshear speaking about being raped by her stepfather and getting pregnant at 12 years old.
“Hadley’s Law” would rely on the “good faith belief of the physician” that a pregnancy in question is the result of rape or incest, according to draft language.
Beshear, speaking in the Capitol Rotunda Tuesday alongside Yates and Duvall, said he would sign the bill should it reach his desk.
“We know that there will be trauma where there is an act of incest or rape,” Stivers said on KET. “That’s tough. That’s where it gets (to be a) hard decision.”
He then said any perpetrators should be “swiftly” and “harshly” punished and called for wrap-around services for survivors.
“There is a lot of discussion,” Stivers said. “I do not know what the outcome will be.”
Yates, who said he hopes for bipartisan support on the legislation, said his bill won’t “fix” all the problems he sees in the state’s laws, but “this is a very small step in the right direction for a very limited number of victims that we can help.”
“We limited it in this particular bill,” he said, “because that’s what we think may pass.”
Duvall said she hopes legislators from both political parties will support the exceptions.
“Unless you’ve been in this position,” she said, “you have no idea what any woman or girl is currently going through. Legislators shouldn’t feel entitled to force victims who have stories like mine to carry a baby with a rapist.”
Duvall said she hopes her story will educate people for whom “it’s hard to think that those things (rape and incest) do happen behind closed doors.”
“I could have been anybody’s daughter,” Duvall said. “I could have been anybody’s sister. Anybody’s niece or granddaughter. And at any point, it could be theirs.”
This story will be updated.
