Anti-Abortion JD Vance Tells Country His Friend Is Grateful for Her Abortion

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) and Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) faced off in their first—and potentially only—vice presidential debate on Tuesday night and Vance went running from his record on abortion. He acted like he and former President Donald Trump just want to help women and pregnant people, rather than further restrict their rights.

The moderators asked Vance to respond to a claim from Vice President Kamala Harris at the DNC—which Walz repeated during the debate—that a possible Trump administration would create a registry of miscarriages and abortions, as outlined in the Project 2025 playbook for a second Trump term. Vance said they wouldn’t do that, before acknowledging that many people don’t like his abortion positions and then bringing up a friend of his who once told him she’d had an abortion and was grateful for it.

Sen. @JDVance on abortion: "My party, we've got to do so much better of a job at earning the American people's trust back on this issue where they, frankly, they just don't trust us…I want us as a Republican Party to be pro family is the fullest sense of the word." pic.twitter.com/l1GE9Qfhzx

— CSPAN (@cspan) October 2, 2024

I need to print the bulk of his answer in full:

“I know a lot of Americans don’t agree with everything that I’ve ever said on this topic. And, you know, I grew up in a working-class family in a neighborhood where I knew a lot of young women who had unplanned pregnancies and decided to terminate those pregnancies because they feel like they didn’t have any other options….One of them is actually very dear to me, and I know she’s watching tonight, and I love ya. And she told me something a couple years ago that she felt like if she hadn’t had that abortion, that it would have destroyed her life because she was in an abusive relationship.

And I think that what I take from that, as a Republican who proudly wants to protect innocent life in this country, who proudly wants to protect the vulnerable, is that my party, we’ve got to do so much better of a job at earning the American people’s trust back on this issue where they, frankly, just don’t trust us. And I think that’s one of the things that Donald Trump and I are endeavoring to do. I want us as a Republican Party to be pro-family in the fullest sense of the word. I want us to support fertility treatments. I want us to make it easier for moms to afford to have babies. I want to make it easier for young families to afford a home so they can afford a place to raise that family. I think there’s so much that we can do on the public policy front just to give women more options.”

Then Vance pivots to the campaign’s favorite lie that abortion will remain a state issue. Of course, on fertility treatments, Vance voted against the Right to IVF Act not once but twice this year—first in June then again in September. But I just need to linger on the fact that Vance invoked the story of a good friend who had an abusive partner and confided in him that her life would have been “destroyed” without an abortion.

It’s hard for people to trust Republicans like Vance on this issue because many of them have railed against no-fault divorce. When Vance was running for Senate in 2021, he suggested that people in even violent marriages shouldn’t get divorced, calling divorce an “experiment” that has harmed kids. “This is one of the great tricks that I think the sexual revolution pulled on the American populace, which is the idea that like, ‘Well, OK, these marriages were fundamentally, you know, they were maybe even violent, but certainly they were unhappy,’” Vance said. “And so getting rid of them and making it easier for people to shift spouses like they change their underwear, that’s going to make people happier in the long term.” It’s very slimy of Vance to share his friend’s story in an effort to humanize himself and the party when we know what he really thinks about women’s freedoms.

The moderators also asked Vance about his past support for a national 15-week ban, and Vance quickly countered that he never supported a ban but rather a “minimum national standard.” (Like Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley before him.) But a nationwide ban after 15 weeks is just a ban after that point. And before joining the Trump ticket, Vance said in November 2023: “We can’t give in to the idea that the federal Congress has no role in this matter.” He also signed a January 2023 letter urging the Department of Justice to enforce the 19th-century Comstock Act and arrest people who mail the abortion drug mifepristone.