A Republican politician and rape survivor who supported the end of federal abortion rights is now calling on her party not to turn the United States into a version of Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale" where women are raped and forced to birth children.
During an interview on Meet the Press, Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) claimed that there are extremists on "both sides" of the abortion debate.
Mace, a childhood rape survivor, said that she supported overturning Roe v. Wade protections for women but insisted that a total abortion ban was going too far.
"I think you can look at gestational limits that are reasonable for most Americans," she said. "One of my concerns is you've got states that are going to try to ban women from traveling, that if you're raped that you've got to report it to the police. Well, I was raped when I was 16. And it took me a week to tell my mother. By that time, any evidence would have been gone."
"And the violation of a woman's privacy, I can't tell you how traumatic that event was," the lawmaker recalled. "In my own home state, they want women to be required and mandated to report when they are raped and I just can't even imagine a world where you're a girl, a teenage girl who has been raped to have to report those things."
She added: "Handmaid's Tale was not supposed to be a roadmap, right? This is a place where we can be in the center, we can protect life."
Mace said that she had no regrets about opposing Roe v. Wade despite the possibility of a dystopian future resembling Atwood's book.
Watch the video below from NBC.
