Louisville Democrat tries unusual maneuver on last-minute abortion-ban exceptions bill

FRANKFORT — With just two days left in the legislative session, a Democratic senator from Louisville is invoking an unusual procedure to try to advance an abortion-related bill that has been stalled all session.

Sen. David Yates filed Senate Bill 99 in early January. The bill would create exceptions to the state’s near-total abortion ban, allowing abortion in the case of rape, incest, serious health complications for the mother, or a nonviable fetus.

The bill never received a committee assignment — despite a Senate rule stating all bills must be assigned to a committee. To dislodge the bill, Yates filed a “discharge petition” on Thursday.

Yates dubbed the bill “Hadley’s Law,” after Hadley Duvall, a Kentucky woman who shared her story of becoming pregnant and miscarrying after being raped as a 12-year-old by her stepfather, in a high-profile campaign ad for Gov. Andy Beshear last year.

“I'm disappointed that the legislative leadership chose to not even assign Senate Bill 99 to a committee,” Duvall told reporters during a Thursday press conference at the Capitol. “Kentuckians deserve to know where their elected leaders stand on this issue.”

Had the bill been given a committee hearing, Duvall said she would have testified about her experiences and that she is “just very, very heartbroken” for Kentucky rape and incest survivors who are barred from getting abortions.

What’s next for 'Hadley's Law'?

“Anyone can see that this bill has deliberately been shelved,” Yates said, noting that all of his other bills received committee assignments.

But he acknowledged that with just days left in the legislative session — Friday and Monday — the bill has little chance of passing. He said the purpose of the discharge petition is to provide a chance for “an open, honest discussion” on adding exceptions to the abortion ban.

Yates said if a majority of senators approve the discharge petition  — meaning that they agree the bill has been unreasonably held up without a committee assignment — the bill could skip over the normally lengthy legislative process of committee hearings and get a Senate floor vote.

Even though some Republicans support exceptions to the abortion ban — including Louisville Republican representatives Ken Fleming and Jason Nemes — Yates' discharge effort has little chance of succeeding.

"Enough members of the majority party have to be willing to buck the wishes of their party leaders in an active way not to spring that thing" and get the bill unstuck, said University of Kentucky political scientist Stephen Voss.

Senate President Robert Stivers, R-Prospect, said Yates “is probably making more of a political statement than he is a policy maneuver.”

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Stivers said the Senate rule is that bills should be assigned to a committee within five days. He said Yates’ bill did not get a committee assignment because Yates did not ask him to assign it to a committee.

“On this one, nobody ever really came and talked to us much, at least not me, about placing the bill someplace,” Stivers said.

Yates said he did not push for the bill to be assigned to committee earlier in the session because he was waiting until the Senate finished passing the budget and other priority legislation.

Yates also said he was waiting to see if a similar abortion-ban-exception bill in the House got any traction.

House rules differ from Senate rules in that they do not require bills to get committee assignments, and the House bill was never assigned to a committee.

Stivers also said that even if SB 99 were to somehow get Senate approval, it will be subject to constitutional challenges because it will not have had the requisite three readings in both chambers.

Yates told reporters he disagrees with that position. And he said that even if the bill does not get an airing this session, he plans to continue pushing the measure forward.

“This can’t just be muted,” Yates said.

Reach Rebecca Grapevine at rgrapevine@courier-journal.com or follow her on X, formerly known as Twitter, at @RebGrapevine.

This article originally appeared on Louisville Courier Journal: Abortion-ban exceptions bill gets late push from Louisville Democrat