Another past comment by Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance has been brought to light — this time, regarding his view that there should be a “federal response” to restrict people from states with abortion bans from traveling across state lines to access the procedure.
In an appearance on Aimee Terese’s “What’s Left?” podcast series, a conservative program, Vance and the host were discussing the possibility of Roe v. Wade being overturned, which hadn’t happened yet when the interview took place. Vance suggested that, in the event that the decades-old precedent protecting abortion rights was upended, Congress should consider regulating interstate travel to ensure that people who want an abortion but live in a state with an abortion ban couldn’t obtain the procedure in a state with fewer regulations.
Vance hypothesized a scenario in which defenders of reproductive rights might try to organize transportation options for people in those restrictive states and pushed unfounded conspiracy theories — including claims that George Soros might organize such initiatives and that progressives would purposely target women of color to get abortions, a blatantly false notion that echoes the far right talking point that abortion is a means to eradicate nonwhite races of people.
“If that happens, do you need some federal response to prevent it from happening because it’s really creepy?” Vance said on the program, adding that he’s “pretty sympathetic” to the idea of federal legislation regulating a person’s freedom to travel between states based on their pregnancy status.
The presidential campaign for Kamala Harris issued a statement blasting Vance for his views.
“J.D. Vance’s obsession with controlling women’s most personal health care decisions, from blocking access to IVF, to tracking women’s menstrual cycles, to passing a national abortion ban to bar women from traveling to access the care they need, isn’t just bad policy — it’s creepy, it’s unacceptable, and voters won’t stand for it,” Harris campaign spokesperson Sarafina Chitika told HuffPost about his past comments.
Vance has become less outspoken about his views on abortion since being named the vice presidential running-mate for GOP nominee for president Donald Trump, likely a strategic move to keep his stances hidden from the American public, as a number of polls demonstrate that a majority of voters are supportive of keeping abortion access legal at the federal level.
Vance gave a toned-down speech at the Republican National Convention where he didn’t mention his views at all, for example — including his opinion that there should be a national abortion ban. His campaign website, which included a call for the complete elimination of abortion, was also scrapped when he became the vice presidential nominee.
Meanwhile, Vance has been struggling to answer questions about other statements he’s made in the past; in one resurfaced video, he complained about “childless cat ladies” and the “childless left” having, in his view, undue political power compared to voters with children. Vance suggested that these individuals have no “direct stake” in the future of the country, indicating that he therefore viewed female political leaders without children with annoyance.
Last week, Vance doubled down on those remarks, saying he had “nothing against cats” but adding that his comment that childless Americans had less at stake in the country’s progression was “true.” On Sunday, in an appearance on Fox News, Vance continued to refuse to retract his statement or acknowledge that it was sexist, saying instead that voters supportive of his campaign “should pray for those people” and “have sympathy for them.”
Beyond showing a distaste for women without children, Vance has consistently peddled white nationalist views and promoted the “trad” lifestyle that has become popular among far right social media users, which romanticizes gender norms of the 1950s and caters to a white-centric narrative, reproductive justice activist Renee Bracey Sherman said.
“When JD Vance talks about what this future looks like, where he wants women at home, he’s picturing white women. He is very sure that he wants white women to be at home procreating, while the rest of us are laboring under capitalism,” Bracey Sherman said in an interview on “Democracy Now!” this week.
“[Vance] has such a worldview in which…whiteness is the default,” Bracey Sherman said, adding that “women’s role in society,” according to Vance, “is to have children.”
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