During the vice presidential debate on Tuesday, Republican nominee Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio strategically misrepresented his long-held extremist views on abortion, taking a softer tone on the issue to appeal to viewers at home.
Vance debated against Democratic vice presidential nominee Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota. During the debate, the candidates discussed the issue of abortion for about 10 minutes.
Walz’s comments suggested that, like his running mate Vice President Kamala Harris, he wants to return to the federal abortion protections that were established by Roe v. Wade, which the Supreme Court overturned in 2022. He included in his answer stories of women who have been harmed by harsh abortion restrictions in states throughout the U.S.
“If you don’t know [women like this], you soon will. Their Project 2025 is going to have a registry of pregnancies,” Walz said, alluding to the Heritage Foundation document that outlines a far right plan for the next conservative president to implement once in office.
Meanwhile, Vance tried to present his anti-abortion views as reasonable, despite his past extremist statements. “We can be a big and diverse country where we respect people’s freedom of conscience and make the country more pro-baby and pro-family,” he said at one point.
When moderators inquired about statements he made just two years ago in support of a national abortion ban, Vance pushed back, falsely claiming that wasn’t his stance at all.
“I never supported a national ban. When I was running for Senate in 2022, I talked about setting a minimum national standard,” Vance said.
Of course, a “minimum standard” is itself a ban, restricting when people can obtain abortion services based on how many weeks pregnant they are.
Vance’s statements on the debate stage were not only disingenuous, but flat-out false, as he has consistently argued for a ban starting at the moment of fertilization.
In 2022, as he was running for the Senate seat he now sits in, Vance said on a podcast that he wanted to ban abortion altogether.
“I certainly would like abortion to be illegal nationally,” Vance said in the interview.
Within that same conversation — which took place before federal abortion protections were overturned — Vance speculated that if Roe were to be upended and states started enacting their own rules on abortion, billionaire George Soros might fund initiatives to help people obtain abortions by providing transportation from restrictive states to more lenient ones.
Vance questioned whether the federal government should get involved in restricting travel for pregnant people if that hypothetical were to come true. “If that happens, do you need some federal response to prevent it from happening?” Vance said, adding that he was “pretty sympathetic” to the idea.
Vance has also openly stated that he doesn’t support exceptions to abortion bans for rape or incest, callously claiming that “two wrongs don’t make a right.”
These comments from Vance, all made within the last election cycle, suggest his tempered remarks during the debate shouldn’t be trusted by voters concerned about reproductive rights.
Vance’s running mate, former President Donald Trump, has also tried to whitewash his far right stances on abortion.
In a post on X during the vice presidential debate, Trump claimed that he would veto a federal ban on abortion.
“EVERYONE KNOWS I WOULD NOT SUPPORT A FEDERAL ABORTION BAN, UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, AND WOULD, IN FACT, VETO IT, BECAUSE IT IS UP TO THE STATES TO DECIDE BASED ON THE WILL OF THEIR VOTERS,” Trump wrote.
This is the first time Trump has made a statement saying he would veto such a bill. In fact, Trump has taken conflicting stances on abortion over the past several years and throughout the election cycle, likely as an attempt to appease his Christian nationalist base while not losing support from more mainstream voters.
Trump, for example, has bragged about appointing enough far right justices to the Supreme Court to overturn Roe, saying that he has “no regrets” over doing so, even though several states have now passed draconian bans that forbid abortion at any stage of pregnancy.
Earlier this year, Trump suggested that he was in favor of a national abortion ban, only backing away from the idea when it became clear to him that it was unpopular.
“We’re going to come up with a time — and maybe we could bring the country together on that issue. … The number of weeks now, people are agreeing on 15. And I’m thinking in terms of that,” Trump said this past spring before abruptly changing his stance a few weeks later.
Reproductive rights advocates and health care experts agree that restrictions at that time of a pregnancy are unnecessary and dangerous.
“We know that [bans like these create] very real daily harms for pregnant people across the country — people who oftentimes want their pregnancy but abortion is the only viable treatment for them to save their own lives,” said MSNBC political analyst Juanita Tolliver, responding to Trump’s suggestion of a 15-week ban.
“When Trump says things like this, it can’t be dismissed,” Tolliver added.
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