During Tuesday night’s vice presidential debate round, Ohio Sen. JD Vance admitted that Republicans need to do a better job talking to women about the issue of abortion.
Vance recalled growing up in a working-class family where she knew “a lot of young women who decided to terminate these pregnancies.” She specifically called her friend, who she said terminated a pregnancy from an abusive relationship, and told her how difficult it was for her.
“I think that as a Republican who proudly wants to protect innocent life, who proudly wants to protect vulnerable people in this country, my party, we have to do a better job of making a profit. The confidence of the American people on this issue, when, frankly, they don’t trust us,” Vance said. “That’s one of the things that Donald Trump and I are trying to do. I want us as a Republican Party to be pro-family in every sense of the word. I want to support fertility treatment.”
It was a shift from Trump’s comments, where he repeatedly referred to the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade tried to keep the decision to overturn something the public wanted. Vance’s comments came as he confronted Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz in a lengthy exchange on abortion, in which each man at times accused the other of taking extreme positions.
Vance went on to say that he and Trump were consistent about state-by-state abortion policies to represent a “diverse” country.
“California’s view on this issue is different from Georgia’s. Georgia has a different vision than Arizona. The right way to handle this, as messy as democracy sometimes is, is to let the voters make those decisions, to let individual states make their own abortion policies,” he said.
He also accused Democrats of taking “too radical a pro-abortion stance” and said Harris would coerce medical professionals who oppose abortion.
During the debate, Trump wrote on social media that he would veto the federal abortion ban If it goes to his desk as president, the question danced around in recent weeks.
Walz accused Trump and Vance of adopting extreme principles and warned that they would establish some kind of pregnancy registry — which Vance has denied — and create barriers to access to contraception and fertility treatment.
“This issue makes everyone think. Donald Trump started it all. He argued that he would hire judges and Roe v. He’s bragging about how big he was when he beat Wade,” Walz said.
Walz then scoffed at the notion that a state-by-state solution was somehow tailored for women. He cited a case in Texas where a woman suffered a severe complication at 18 weeks but was denied an abortion.
“At this point, medical care has to be decided by a doctor, and that would be an abortion, but in Texas, that would put them in legal jeopardy,” Walz said. “She went home, got sepsis, almost died, and now she may have trouble having children.”
Walz Harris’ Roe v. He backed up his promise to rebuild the defense under Wade and repeated an oft-used line: “Mind your own business about it.”