Hadley Duvall, a 22-year-old abortion rights activist who tells her brutal incest story with calm and candor as part of her advocacy, takes center stage again in a powerful new one-minute campaign ad for Vice President Kamala Harris.
[NOTE: Duvall’s story first gained wide notoriety when she spoke at the Democratic National Convention last month in a searing moment criticizing the removal of the protections of Roe v. Wade and its implications.]
In the campaign ad, Duvall’s voice intones in a voiceover — against the score of Billie Eilish’s “When the Party’s Over” — saying that “because Donald Trump overturned Roe v. Wade, girls and women all over the country have lost the right to choose, even for rape or incest. Donald Trump did this. He took away our freedom.”
[Eilish has also endorsed Harris and has granted the Harris-Walz campaign permission to use her song.]
Duvall, who was raped by her stepfather and impregnated at age 12, is also being promoted in an X post video shared by the campaign, where she reveals that she is able to stand on her own two feet today because when she got a positive result from her first pregnancy test at the age of 12, she was told she had “options.”
Getting the result was, indeed, the “first time I was ever told,” she said “you have options.”
Those options no longer exist in many places in the United States for girls who are criminally placed in situations like Duvall’s, she says, and she blames the GOP, the Supreme Court, and Trump, who has boasted about ending Roe.
Trump has called the SCOTUS’s decision to remove Roe’s protections and return abortion legislation to the states a “beautiful” move, asserting it’s what “everybody wanted.”
Duvall asks, responding to Trump’s claim: “What’s so beautiful about a child having to carry her parent’s child?”
Hadley Duvall: Trump calls abortion bans across the country a beautiful thing. What’s so beautiful about a child having to carry her parent’s child? https://t.co/0sNRfwyibU pic.twitter.com/HnbIzbzZpj
— Kamala HQ (@KamalaHQ) September 18, 2024
[Note: Trump has said he personally believes there should be exceptions for rape, but in helping overturn Roe, he has ensured that those exceptions don’t exist in numerous states like Kentucky, Duvall’s home state, where an effort by Democrats to add an exception for rape to the state’s abortion restrictions was shot down in April.]
Hadley Duvall: I will ask people, ‘Could you sit down with me one-on-one and listen to every detail of trauma that I had to experience for about ten years?’ If you can’t do that, you should not feel comfortable walking into a voting booth and voting for a man who has the audacity… pic.twitter.com/VgiAQvBTPf
— Kamala HQ (@KamalaHQ) September 18, 2024