As The Washington Post’s Amber Phillips wrote recently, most of the recent GOP bills preemptively banning abortion or severely curtailing it include no exemptions for rape and incest. That includes bills signed recently in Florida, Kentucky and Oklahoma. Red states have passed about a dozen such laws this year, and only three include such exceptions, according to the Guttmacher Institute, which tracks such legislation and supports abortion rights. Arizona’s ban after 15 weeks makes no exceptions for rape and incest.
And as the GOP begins nominating candidates for November’s elections, several of them have explicitly said no to exceptions for rape and incest.
J.D. Vance, who won Ohio’s GOP Senate nomination Tuesday, said late last year that pregnancy from such situations is “inconvenient,” but that “two wrongs don’t make a right.”
Trump-backed Senate candidate Rep. Ted Budd (R-N.C.) said last week that he opposes any exceptions even in those cases.
In Georgia, gubernatorial candidate and former senator David Perdue, whom Trump endorsed, and five GOP Senate candidates said at a debate that they don’t support rape and incest exceptions. (A sixth, front-runner Herschel Walker, wasn’t at the debate but has said on a survey that he opposes those exceptions.)
And in Michigan, Matthew DePerno, who earned the state GOP’s endorsement for attorney general late last month, has said that in that role he wouldn’t support exceptions for rape, incest or even the life of the mother.
Ohio GOP congresswoman cast pregnancies from rape as an “opportunity” for the victims. A Michigan Republican said, “I tell my daughters, ‘Well if rape is inevitable, you should just lie back and enjoy it.'”