Kelly Clarkson gets emotional discussing Arizona's abortion ban and her own pregnancy challenges

Dustin Nelson
·2 min read

"We are going backward," Clarkson said, lamenting Arizona's pre-statehood law written in 1864.

Kelly Clarkson got emotional discussing Arizona's near-total ban on abortion and her own pregnancy challenges during an episode of The Kelly Clarkson Show this week.

With former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as her guest, Clarkson dove into a discussion of the Arizona Supreme Court ruling on abortion based on a law written in 1864, before the end of the Civil War and before Arizona was a state.

"Did you ever think in your lifetime we would see that happen?" Clarkson asked Clinton. "It's just insane to me the thinking that went on in 1864. It's a very different world. We know a lot more now. We are going backward."

"It is horrifying in every way," Clinton said. "I feared it would happen, but I hoped it wouldn't happen. Now, here we are in the middle of this very difficult period for women in about half the states of our country, who cannot get the care that they need."

Clinton, who is promoting Suffs, a Broadway musical about the women's suffrage movement in the U.S., continued, "The old law in Arizona is without exceptions [for rape and incest], and the danger to women's lives as well as to our right to make our own decisions about our bodies and ourselves is so profound. And there's another element to it, which I find so troubling, there's a kind of cruelty to it."

The previously dormant law criminalizes abortion unless the pregnant person's life is at stake.

Clarkson, holding back tears, lamented "voter apathy" before discussing her own pregnancy challenges. "I literally asked God, this is a real thing, to just take me and my son in the hospital for the second time, because I was like, 'It's the worst thing,'" she said. “It was my decision, and I’m so glad I did it. I love my babies, but to make someone... You don’t realize how hard it is. The fact that you would take that away from someone, that can literally kill them. The fact that if they’re raped by their family member and they have to — it’s just like insane to me.”

Touching again on voter apathy, Clinton called voting a "superpower" before returning to the Arizona law written during Abraham Lincoln's presidency. "There was a vote in the Arizona legislature to try to repeal this 1864 law, so that there could be a much more sensible approach. It lost. It matters who is representing you."

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