An impassioned plea from a 12-year-old girl has gone viral after she spoke to West Virginia Republican lawmakers during a public hearing for an abortion bill that would prohibit the procedure in nearly all cases.
On Wednesday, Addison Gardner of Buffalo middle school in Kenova, West Virginia, was among several people who spoke out against the bill.
Addressing the West Virginia house of delegates, Gardner, among about 90 other speakers, was given 45 seconds to plead her case.
“My education is very important to me and I plan on doing great things in life. If a man decides that I’m an object and does unspeakable and tragic things to me, am I, a child, supposed to carry and birth another child?” Gardner said.
She went on to add, “Am I to put my body through the physical trauma of pregnancy? Am I to suffer the mental implications, a child, who had no say in what was being done with my body? Some here say they are pro-life. What about my life? Does my life not matter to you?”
As Gardner – a volleyball and track athlete at her middle school, spoke, she was looked on by Rita Ray, an 80-year-old woman who had an abortion in 1959, 14 years before terminations were deemed a constitutional right.
In a photo captured by Kyle Vass, a journalist from the American Civil Liberties Union of West Virginia, Ray can be seen smiling in the background as Gardner issued her impassioned plea.
One user who tweeted the photo wrote, “Rita Ray, 80, who risked her life pre-Roe by getting an abortion from someone who wasn’t a healthcare provider, watches on as Addison Gardner, 12, contemplates her own future without access to legal abortion in WV.”
Despite speeches from Gardner and other abortion rights activists, the house passed the bill by an overwhelming vote of 69 to 23. Shortly after Gardner delivered her address, house members adopted an amendment that would allow abortions in cases of rape or incest.
However, the amendment, which passed narrowly with 46 to 43 votes, only allows for the procedure to be performed up to 14 weeks of pregnancy and only if the rape or incest is reported to the police.
The state senate’s adoption of at least two of a dozen offered amendments on Friday means the bill must now go back to the house of delegates for consideration.
Unlike some other states which have “trigger bans” that would ban abortions within 30 days of Roe being overturned, West Virginia has a 150-year-old pre-Roe abortion ban that would come back into effect in the absence of Roe.
Last week, Kanawha county circuit judge Tera Salango blocked the enforcement of the abortion ban and granted the Women’s Health Center of West Virginia, the state’s only abortion clinic, the ability to continue performing the procedure.
Salango said its patients, “especially those who are impregnated as a result of a rape or incest, are suffering irreparable harm”, the Associated Press reports.
West Virginia’s attorney general, Patrick Morrisey, described the ruling as “a dark day for West Virginia”.
The Associated Press contributed reporting
