Gerth: Hadley Duvall gave Kentucky its biggest Democratic National Convention moment in decades
It wasn’t quite what some Kentucky Democrats wanted — a Democratic National Convention that coronated Gov. Andy Beshear as the next vice president of the United States — but it was the biggest night at the convention for Kentucky in 40 years.
That year, 1984, Kentucky Gov. Martha Layne Collins was the convention’s chairwoman, playing a crucial role in planning and carrying out the convention when she, too, had been considered for the vice-presidential slot that went to U.S. Rep. Geraldine Ferraro.
This year, Kentucky had Hadley Duvall.
And while Beshear did a good job delivering his speech just moments before President Joe Biden took the stage — despite whatever awkward thing was going on with his right jacket sleeve that caused people on social media to call on him to get a new tailor — Duvall was the star.
Duvall was the woman who put Beshear’s reelection campaign on her shoulders and carried him to reelection last November, appearing in television spots and telling the story about how she was raped by her stepfather as a child — and how Kentucky’s cruel abortion laws would force her to carry her stepfather’s child to term.
She made another ad for Biden earlier this summer when he was the presumptive nominee for president. On Monday she appeared on the stage at the convention to tell her story once again and to introduce Beshear.
He should have been introducing her.
I think he knows that.
“Hadley Duvall is one of the bravest people I have ever met,” Beshear said as he stepped to the mic.
There is no way Beshear could talk about abortion rights and deliver his words with the same passion or the same vulnerability that Duvall, a survivor, showed as she spoke — sometimes belying a nervous authenticity by smiling at what seemed to be inappropriate times as she talked about what she called “Donald Trump’s abortion ban.”
Kentucky’s law took effect after the U.S. Supreme Court — with three judges appointed by Trump — struck down the 50-year-old Roe v. Wade decision that made abortion rights the law of the land.
Hadley Duvall: Women deserve abortion access. Kentucky laws mean rape victims like me have no options.
“He calls it a beautiful thing. What is so beautiful about a child having to carry her parent’s child?” she asked.
There was an audible gasp that you could hear on the television feed from the United Center in Chicago. Women — and probably some men — in the crowd cried.
“There are other survivors out there who have no options and I want you to know that we see you, we hear you,” she said.
She was a tough act to follow.
But Beshear did and he did so with a speech you wouldn’t have heard a statewide politician in Kentucky give just a few years ago — when Democrats ran scared of the abortion debate in a state where, according to the Pew Research Center, 49% of residents consider themselves evangelical protestants.
That changed in 2022 when Kentucky voters rejected a state constitutional amendment that would have prohibited the Supreme Court from finding that the state constitution protected abortion rights by 4.6 percentage points.
Beshear has steadfastly supported abortion rights throughout his term — in fact he bet his reelection on them — but rarely if ever has he given the full-throated endorsement of abortion rights he gave on Monday.
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And he’s never gone that hard after Trump, who won Kentucky by nearly 26 percentage points in 2020 and nearly 30 percentage points four years earlier.
“I’m amazed at the courage it takes to share her pain, to share her truth, yet Donald Trump brags about tearing a constitutional right away from Hadley and every other woman and girl in our country,” he said. “That’s why we must tear away any chance he can ever be president ever again.”
He noted that Kentucky’s law doesn’t allow abortions even in the case of rape, incest or unviable pregnancies giving women and girls like Duvall no options.
“That fails any test of humanity, any test of basic decency, any test of whether you have any underlying empathy,” he said.
He spent nearly all of his five minutes talking about abortion rights, which Kamala Harris will certainly use as she tries to hand Trump his second electoral loss.
He called Republican policies extreme and especially the policies of Kentucky Republicans with whom he has fought throughout his term.
“A woman grieving a non-viable pregnancy shouldn’t be required to carry it to term just to listen to her child die or to hear no sound at all,” he said.
It was a strong speech — not nearly as strong as Duvall’s — that capped the biggest night Kentucky has had at the DNC since before Duvall was born and Beshear was just 6 years old.
Beshear generally got high marks from what I saw on the internet and television, except for that thing with his coat sleeve.
We’ll see how that translates in Kentucky if he decides to run for U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell’s seat in 2026 — and if he does, he’d be smart to keep Duvall on speed dial. Because she was … wow, just wow.
Joseph Gerth can be reached at 502-582-4702 or by email at [email protected].
This article originally appeared on Louisville Courier Journal: Hadley Duvall story, Beshear gave Kentucky a big DNC moment