Courtesy of Kentucky Lantern
A Kentucky woman who talked about abortion in a pivotal campaign ad for Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear last year is now up on airwaves supporting President Joe Biden on the same issue.
Hadley Duvall, an Owensboro native who is now in her early 20s, told the Kentucky Lantern last year that she began sharing her story about the sexual abuse she experienced as a child after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022.
In the ad for the Biden reelection campaign, text appears between clips of Duvall applying makeup in a mirror to tell the viewer that she was raped by her stepfather as a child. At the age of 12, she became pregnant by him. She later miscarried.
“When Roe v. Wade was overturned, immediately I just thought about being 12, and first thing that was told to me when I saw that positive pregnancy test was, ‘you have options,’” Duvall tells the viewer. “And you know, if Roe v. Wade would have been overturned sooner, I wouldn’t have heard that. And then it had me thinking that there’s someone who doesn’t get to hear that now.”
She then calls out Biden’s opponents, former Republican President Donald Trump and running mate Ohio U.S. Sen. J.D. Vance.
“Trump and J.D. Vance don’t care about women. They don’t care about girls in this situation,” Duvall says. “They will continue to take our rights away. In this election, we have a choice.”
The ad is similar to the one aired by Beshear’s reelection campaign last year about two months before the 2023 election. In it, Duvall pushed Beshear’s Republican opponent, then-Attorney General Daniel Cameron on his stance on abortion access.
Cameron said in September as governor, he would support adding exceptions in cases of rape and incest to Kentucky’s abortion ban — if the General Assembly would approve them. He had previously signaled support for the current state law as it is, without exceptions.
Beshear on the other hand has a history of supporting the standard set by Roe v. Wade. The governor has said the Republican-controlled General Assembly has “given rapists more rights than their victims.” Lawmakers approved a “trigger law” in 2019 that went into effect immediately after the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 ruling.
Kentucky’s law has very narrow exceptions to save the life of the mother. It only allows abortions up to six weeks of pregnancy and does not include exceptions in cases of rape and incest.
On election night, Beshear thanked Duvall in front of a crowd of supporters in Louisville after defeating Cameron. The following day, Beshear called on the legislature to add exceptions to Kentucky’s abortion ban in cases of rape and incest. While Republican and Democratic lawmakers did file bills to do so, they did not get a committee hearing during the 2024 legislative session.
Recently, Duvall has appeared in an MSNBC interview alongside Biden’s running mate, Vice President Kamala Harris, and at a campaign event with First Lady Jill Biden.
Kentucky Lantern is part of States Newsroom, the nation’s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization.
