BATON ROUGE, Louisiana (LifeSiteNews) — The Louisiana House Administration of Criminal Justice Committee yet again rejected a proposal to add rape and incest exception to the state’s strong abortion ban.
Louisiana bans abortion throughout pregnancy except when deemed “necessary” to prevent the death of the mother “due to a physical condition,” to avoid “serious, permanent impairment of a life-sustaining organ of a pregnant woman,” or if two doctors agree that an unborn baby would not survive after birth. In such cases, a physician must “make reasonable medical efforts under the circumstances to preserve both the life of the mother and the life of her unborn child in a manner consistent with reasonable medical practice,” per its 2006 trigger law.
As a result, the state reported fewer than 10 abortions in 2023 and 2024. But for four years, Democrat state Rep. Delisha Boyd has attempted legislation to weaken the law.
“I stand before you again today asking that we think about the life of the baby who got raped and what they have to endure,” Boyd said during her latest attempt on May 19, The Gambit reported. Boyd was conceived in rape and her mother died before age 30. “I think it’s a tragedy that we would force children to carry the babies of their rapist.”
Democrat state Rep. Pat Moore relayed a similar life experience. “There were five of us, and I was the only one that felt different for years. It took years for my mother to love me. I was 19, and we began to form a relationship.” However, she reached the opposite conclusion on allowing abortions for rape, arguing that “I am not the author of life and death. None of us are.”
Abortion proponents have long invoked stories of rape and incest to generate emotional discomfort at the prospect of banning abortion while pro-lifers continue to stress that circumstances of conception do not change the preborn baby’s innocence or humanity, and therefore society must do all it can to treat both mother and child with compassion and note the physical and psychological consequences of abortion.
Pro-lifers further note that rapists also exploit abortion to destroy the living proof of their crimes and continue molesting child victims. The pro-life group Live Action has documented Planned Parenthood’s complicity in several such cases in its “Aiding Abusers” video series.
Thirteen states ban most abortions starting at conception; another five ban it once a fetal heartbeat can be detected (around six weeks), with additional states imposing a range of later restrictions.
But the abortion lobby works feverishly to preserve abortion “access” via deregulated interstate distribution of abortion pills, legal protection and financial support of interstate abortion travel, constructing new abortion facilities near borders shared by pro-life and pro-abortion states, making liberal states sanctuaries for those who want to evade or violate the laws of more pro-life neighbors, and enshrining abortion “rights” in state constitutions, whether via activist lawsuits or state constitutional amendments.
Meanwhile, Louisiana is working to crack down on the importation of abortion pills that undermine its pro-life protections. It has sued California and New York in hopes of extraditing complicit doctors and is currently challenging the federal government’s permissive abortion pill rules at the U.S. Supreme Court.