For a Louisiana lawmaker, exempting incest and rape from the state’s abortion ban is personal

For Louisiana Rep. Delisha Boyd, the uphill battle she faces to exempt pregnancies that are the result of 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 exemption bill Tuesday, the Democratic New Orleans lawmaker has decided to publicly share her own story to underscore the importance of letting rape and incest survivors decide their own fates. If the bill advances, it will still have to make it through both Republican-led chambers of the Legislature.

Boyd says her mother, the victim of statutory rape by a man nearly twice her age, was only 15 when Boyd was conceived. 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 and incest survivors 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 country’s highest maternal mortality rates, or to travel to another state where abortion is still legal.

Supporters of Louisiana’s ban note that if Boyd’s mother had been given the choice to abort, the lawmaker might not exist.

“Aren’t you glad 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 having been born; she just thinks her mother died before her time because of it. Boyd said her mother turned to drugs — something that Boyd attributes in large part to the trauma of giving birth and then raising a child as a teen — and as a result, died before she was 30.

“It was a life for a life,” Boyd told The Associated Press in an interview after a brief but emotional hearing held at the Legislature last week. “You’re then telling me to consider her life less important than my life.”

Boyd added that her story is likely an “exception to the rule” — other children of teen mothers can end up in foster care or turn to drugs or crime, she said. She said just because she turned out OK, it does not give her “the right to tell you what to do in your family.”

Since authoring the bill, Boyd says, she has been told stories similar to hers: that of a Louisiana girl who was raped and gave birth at 13 years old, and a 9-year-old girl who became pregnant after being sexually assaulted.

As in multiple other Republican states,…