Republicans Ignored Rape and Incest Survivors at Louisiana Abortion Hearing: ‘It Felt Like a Slap’

Audrey Wascome, who says she was sexually abused by a relative as a child and later was raped at 17, testified along with other survivors on Wednesday at the Louisiana’s House Criminal Justice Committee. Democrats had introduced legislation to add rape and incest exceptions to the state’s abortion ban, and even after hearing testimony from people like Wascome, Republicans voted them down.

Wascome told me in an interview after the hearing that it felt like an “openly hostile” environment. A man was standing near the witness table with a rosary, reciting Bible verses. Some Republican committee members got up and left in the middle of witness testimony. Other GOP legislators who did stay in the room “were just pretending that the witnesses weren’t there,” she said. “It was super disrespectful.”

“You have survivors describing their private pain and basically begging them for mercy,” said Wascome. “It just felt like a slap.”

Wascome says she noticed one lawmaker rolling her eyes and shaking her head at some of the testimony. “Even if you don’t agree with [adding] exceptions, there’s just common human decency for people talking about their trauma, and it was just missing from a lot of them.”

Wascome shared her own story of assault on Wednesday, telling the committee about being sexually abused by her grandfather for the first decade of her life, as her grandmother filmed the incidents. At age 17, Wascome says she was raped by an acquaintance and didn’t obtain emergency contraception before the 72-hour period had passed. While she didn’t become pregnant, she has since dedicated her time to becoming an advocate for fellow survivors, including for two 9-year-old girls who were both impregnated at age 8 in unrelated cases. One was in her second trimester, the other in her third; they both came into the hospital complaining of stomach pain.

“Neither knew they were pregnant, but how could they? They were still playing with dolls,” Wascome said in her powerful testimony to the committee.

Wascome tells Jezebel that not a week goes by she doesn’t think of those young survivors, wondering what happened to them. She says one of the children’s fetuses didn’t have a heartbeat by the time she came in, but that the doctor at the time refused to conduct a D&C and save the fetal remains as DNA evidence for a rape case. Wascome ended up arranging for the child and her family to seek care at a nearby abortion clinic, which, of course, is now closed.

She told the committee she was putting the right to her privacy aside by putting her story in the public record, in the hopes of “salvaging someone else’s life.”

Andrea Dubé is another survivor who testified at the hearing, telling the committee that she had a pregnancy scare after being raped, and if she’d been forced to carry it to term, she would have died by suicide. She also says she felt completely ignored by Republican legislators.

“It feels pretty crappy that I was inside, publicly crying and talking about killing myself while they were out in the hallways shooting the shit with lobbyists and pro-lifers,” Dubé told me. “They voted against abortion access for raped children but apparently couldn’t stomach our three minute statements.”

“It was emotionally exhausting to see survivors pouring out their souls and giving up their privacy when the outcome of the bill was obviously determined well before we got there,” said Morgan Lamandre, the president and CEO of Sexual Trauma Awareness and Response (STAR). “There was a total and complete lack of attention paid to survivors by some of the legislators, even when they were sitting right in front of survivors. It was hard to watch.”

Lift Louisiana Executive Director Michelle Erenberg corroborated accounts that most of the Republican committee members left the room during the testimony of patients, survivors and doctors. They only returned to the committee room to vote against the bills. She said her organization is “extremely disappointed to see that committee members have chosen to overlook the suffering of rape and incest survivors in favor of a cruel position endorsed by extremists.”

All five of the abortion-related bills aimed at softening the state’s abortion ban were scheduled on the annual “Pro-Life Day at the Capitol.” (All five bills either failed to get out of committee or were deferred.) Buses filled with anti-abortion activists arrived in Baton Rouge for the day, and in the capitol’s rotunda, Louisiana Right to Life served “Everyone Deserves a Birthday” Cake to visitors and legislators.

So while some survivors were sharing their personal trauma, literally weeping and asking that legislators not force future survivors to be constantly retraumatized, anti-abortion activists were telling rape survivors that holding their rapist’s baby could be “therapeutic”—and quite literally eating cake.