For Louisiana Rep. Delisha Boyd, the uphill battle she faces to exempt pregnancies resulting from rape and incest from Louisiana’s strict abortion ban is not just morally right — it’s also personal.
With a GOP-dominated legislative committee set to debate and vote on Boyd’s waiver bill on Tuesday, the New Orleans Democratic lawmaker decided to publicly share her own story to emphasize the importance of allowing survivors of rape and incest to decide their own destinies. If the bill moves forward, it will still have to be approved in both Republican-led chambers of the Legislature.
Boyd says his mother, a victim of rape by a man nearly twice her age, was just 15 when Boyd was conceived. Boyd was born in 1969, four years before abortion became legal under the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision, Roe v. Wade. Wade.
More than five decades later, survivors of rape and incest in Louisiana who become pregnant find themselves in a similar situation: forced to carry the baby to term in a state that has one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the country, or to travel to another state where abortion is still legal.
Supporters of the Louisiana ban note that if Boyd’s mother had been given the option to have an abortion, the legislature might not exist.
“Aren’t you happy to be here?” GOP state Rep. Tony Bacala asked her, according to a report in The Times-Picayune/The New Orleans Advocate.
Boyd says it’s not that she regrets being born; she just thinks her mother died prematurely because of this. Boyd said her mother turned to drugs — something Boyd largely attributes to the trauma of giving birth to and then raising a child as a teenager — and as a result, she died before she was 30.
“It was a life for a life,” Boyd told The Associated Press in an interview following a brief but emotional hearing held at the Legislature last week. “So you’re telling me to consider her life less important than mine.”
Boyd added that her story is likely an “exception to the rule” — other children of teenage mothers may end up in foster homes or turn to drugs or crime, she said. She said that just because she got well doesn’t give her “the right to tell you what to do in your family.”
Since drafting the bill, Boyd says, she has heard stories similar to hers: that of a Louisiana girl who was raped and gave birth at age 13, and that of a 9-year-old girl who became pregnant after being abused sexually.
Like several other Republican states, Louisiana’s abortion law took effect in 2022, following the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that overturned Roe v. Wade. Wade, ending half a century of national abortion rights. The only exceptions to the ban are if there is a substantial risk of death or disability for the mother if she continues the pregnancy or in the case of “medically futile” pregnancies – when the fetus has a fatal abnormality.
In 2021, there were 7,444 abortions reported in Louisiana, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Of these, 27 were obtained by people under 15 years of age. Nationwide, 1,338 pregnant patients under the age of 15 have had abortions, according to the CDC.
A study released by the Journal of the American Medical Association found that between July 2022 and January 2024, more than 64,000 pregnancies resulting from rape occurred in states where abortion was banned in all or most cases.
The legislative committee will consider Boyd’s bill on Tuesday. A nearly identical measure effectively died in the same committee last year. Committee members delayed the hearing that began last week to give Boyd time to make adjustments.
Boyd said he plans to amend his proposal so that the rape and incest exceptions would only apply to those under 17. She hopes the change will help the measure advance to a debate before the House plenary.
Of the 14 states that prohibit abortion at all stages of pregnancy, six have exceptions for rape and five have exceptions for incest. But Boyd faces an uphill battle in Louisiana, a reliably red state firmly in the Bible Belt where even some Democrats oppose abortion.
She hopes sharing her mother’s story will bring to light the realities that pregnant rape and incest survivors face — and possibly change the minds of some opposing lawmakers.
“No one cared for her, no one thought to consider what was happening to her emotionally, psychologically, probably even spiritually. … I was just conceived and left for her to raise,” Boyd said.
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