It speaks volumes about Missouri’s current Republican political landscape that Lt. Gov. Mike Kehoe’s openness to rape and incest exceptions to the state’s rigid abortion ban is widely considered a risky gambit in his bid for the GOP gubernatorial nomination next year.
In the upside-down world of state Republicanism today, Kehoe risks being defined as an extremist for even considering the possibility that women and girls who have already been victimized in some of the worst ways imaginable shouldn’t be victimized again by the forced-birth policies of their own state government. Never mind that that view is far more in line with the view of regular Missourians, including regular Republicans.
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Fellow candidates Jay Ashcroft and Bill Eigel will nonetheless inevitably try to cast Kehoe as out of step with his party for this most modest nod to reason and compassion. Yet there are strategic and philosophical reasons Republican primary voters should consider embracing it.
Immediately after the U.S. Supreme Court last year overturned Roe v. Wade, leaving the contentious issue of abortion to the states, Missouri enacted a law that makes abortion illegal from the moment of conception in almost all cases — rape and incest included — except in instances of vaguely defined medical emergencies. Doctors who violate the ban can face 15 years in prison.
To be sure, Missouri is a conservative state, but there’s little if any indication that regular Missourians are so extreme on the issue. State polling shows that strong majorities of likely voters in Missouri — including some 60% to 64% of Republicans — favor exceptions for the victims of rape and incest.
In light of such numbers, Kehoe’s position would seem to put him closer to the Republican mainstream than his in-party opponents: His campaign says he would oppose any attempt to overturn the abortion ban itself, but as “the father of three daughters,” he would “consider approving legislation brought forward by the General Assembly that contains exceptions for rape, incest, and life of the mother.”
Missouri Republicans considering the issue should ponder it in those personal terms. What parents of a daughter (even a teenager; even a child) who endures a sexual assault would believe it remotely acceptable to force her to carry a resulting pregnancy to term against her wishes?
Yet that abject cruelty is exactly what Missouri’s current law mandates — a mandate that both Ashcroft and Eigel would insist on maintaining in its current, unyielding form, according to their campaigns.
Most elected Missouri Republicans know full well that such an extreme position doesn’t reflect the will of the state’s electorate at large. They know that when citizens in Kansas and other conservative states were recently given the opportunity of up-or-down votes on abortion rights, they defended them.
Ashcroft knows this as well as anyone — which explains why he’s diligently abusing his official authority in an attempt to thwart current efforts at getting abortion rights on Missouri’s ballot next year.
The irony is that a slight opening to moderation of the kind Kehoe suggests would actually reduce the chances that voters will overturn the overall abortion ban because its most unpopular element — re-victimizing rape victims — would already be gone.
We’re not here to sing Kehoe’s praises for continuing to support the bulk of a policy which, even without that truly draconian element, would continue to render half of Missourians second-class citizens. As we’ve said before, the whole ban should go.
But Republican primary voters who disagree should keep in mind that Kehoe’s stance means they can now support the overall ban without having to accept what the majority of them know is an unjust burden on rape and incest victims. They finally have, well, a choice.