Indianapolis Mayor Discloses Wife Aborted Abnormal Fetus

Mayor William H. Hudnut said he and his wife chose to abort her 18-week pregnancy after learning that the fetus’s vital organs were developing abnormally.

Hudnut’s 32-year-old wife, Beverly, underwent “the labor and delivery of the stillborn infant” at Indiana University Medical Center last weekend, the mayor said in a statement this week.

Hudnut’s press secretary, Dave Arland, said the mayor had spent most of the week at home with his wife.

“They’re both working through the grief of this tragic loss,” Arland said.

Hudnut, a four-term mayor in office for 16 years, has never made abortion a campaign issue. But, during an unsuccessful bid for secretary of state last year, he said that he “didn’t feel it was correct to intervene in what a woman wants to do with her own body.”

Hudnut, 58, said he felt obligated to make the abortion public because it had been widely reported that the couple, who married in 1989, were expecting their first child. The mayor has children from an earlier marriage.

Anti-abortion activists have said they disagree with the decision but stopped short of directly criticizing the Hudnuts.

Marigrace Bailey, president of Right to Life of Indianapolis, said the group believes that abortion is justifiable only when necessary to save the mother’s life. However, “It’s not our place to judge them after the fact,” she said.

Arland said he knows of no negative comment about the abortion.