So Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson was asked, while discussing the new Oklahoma law, where he stands on the Arkansas trigger law he signed a while back and which bans abortions outright with the only exception for saving the life of the pregnant woman. There are no exceptions for pregnancies after rape or incest.
Governor Hutchinson suggested that the law will need to be revisited to include exceptions under such circumstances and also said that he would have liked those exceptions to be included in the law he signed but that there were no majorities for that at the time.
Hutchinson is a graduate of Bob Jones University and his religion is listed as christian. That means he is not really into the fine points of protecting all human life, ensoulment and fetal personhood beyond the political exploitation of such notions.
The problem is that there are those for whom fetal personhood and protection of human life is the whole point and for them all unborns are babies and, consequently, all abortions are murders of babies.
There is only one reason these people agree with the maternal indication, that is abortion to save the mother, and that reason is that the unborn would die no matter what and saving the woman´s life therefore becomes a consideration.
The trouble is that a change to the law allowing abortion after rape and incest gets the state into the business of deciding which fetus deserves to live and which not - not a big deal for christians like Hutchinson but for those who consider abortions the killing of babies, it is definitely a big deal.
Interestingly, it is also a big deal for anyone who wishes to decrease the total number of abortions and have those that are performed to be done as early during gestation as possible by establishing easy access to reproductive health services that also provide abortion services. It´s a big deal because of the difficulty and the time consuming process of establishing that rape or incest has actually occurred, thereby pushing the abortions of perfectly healthy fetuses toward a later gestational age. Add to that the often late presentation of incest victims and you have the potential for truly horrifying scenarios.
(A while ago, Greg Abbott, governor of Texas responded differently to a similar question regarding the Texas anti-abortion law: he simply said that there would be no more rapes in Texas, and what that implies is pretty clear. But Abbott saw the problem that could cause problems in the Pro-life political coalition)
https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2022/05/22/arkansas-state-trigger-law-abortion-incest-rape-governor-asa-hutchinson-sotu-vpx.cnn/video/playlists/this-week-in-politics/
