"If the Rape Actually Occurred."

On January 16, 2023, which happened to be Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Scott Herndon walked into the Senate State Affairs Committee with a bill to eliminate Idaho's rape and incest exceptions to its abortion ban. He compared this to Dr. King's civil rights work, out loud, on the holiday, which tells you something about his sense of occasion. Senate Minority Leader Melissa Wintrow asked the obvious question: would a 13-year-old girl who had been raped be forced to carry that pregnancy to term? Herndon's answer, verbatim: "Using the word 'force' is actually the problem." He then offered this: "Some people could describe the situation that you're talking about as the opportunity to have a child in those terrible circumstances, if the rape actually occurred." Read that last clause again. A sitting state senator was handed a hypothetical about a raped child, and the part he felt needed qualifying was whether she was telling the truth.

It wasn't a slip. Herndon told the committee that under current law a victim only has to file a police report, which he dismissed as "merely an allegation," as though the problem with Idaho's abortion ban was that it took rape victims at their word too easily. The committee, controlled by his own party, refused to even print the bill. One senator voted with him. Everyone else, Republicans included, looked at a proposal to tell a seventh-grader she had been given an "opportunity" and decided it didn't deserve a hearing. This is the man who also wrote the Idaho GOP platform plank calling for "the criminalization of all murders by abortion," no exceptions, so none of this was a bad morning or a poorly chosen word. It's the position. He just said it clearly enough that his own colleagues flinched.