Why Hadley Duvall became a voice of the Harris campaign

Hadley Duvall got a standing ovation at the Democratic National Convention on Monday night when she asked the room: “What is so beautiful about a child having to carry her parent's child?”. It was a rebuke in response to Donald Trump’s earlier remark that overturning Roe v Wade was a “beautiful thing”. It was also a sign of how the Harris-Walz campaign plans to use abortion as a vote-swinger for the election. Duvall, now in her early 20s, was raped by her stepfather and became pregnant when she was 12 after years of sexual abuse. She subsequently miscarried. But not even her mother knew the full details of what had happened when she was a teenager until she posted on Facebook the day after the Supreme Court overturned Roe in June 2022.

The ruling triggered a near-total abortion ban in her home state Kentucky, with no exceptions for rape or incest. Her post went viral and led the state’s Democratic governor, Andy Beshear, to release an advert for his re-election campaign in which Duvall told Beshear’s opponent it was “unthinkable” to tell a 12 year old girl she must have the baby of a stepfather who raped her. The advert was acknowledged by both candidates as a factor in Beshear’s 2023 win.

An Associated Press / NORC poll in June found support for legal abortion increased post-Roe across all political affiliations, with 57 per cent of independents saying their state should allow abortion for any reason, compared with 46 per cent in 2021.