Since Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) was announced this week as former President Donald Trump’s running mate in his 2024 presidential campaign, details about Vance’s past policy positions are resurfacing — including his support for a nationwide abortion ban.
CNN found that Vance said in a 2022 episode of the podcast “Very Fine People,” that he would “certainly” like for “abortion to be illegal nationally.”
“Let’s say Roe v. Wade is overruled,” the freshman senator said in the episode, which aired before he assumed office in 2023.
“Ohio bans abortion … in, let’s say, 2024. And then, every day, George Soros sends a 747 to Columbus to load up disproportionately Black women to get them to go have abortions in California. And of course, the left will celebrate this as a victory for diversity.”
“If that happens, do you need some federal response to prevent it from happening?” Vance added. “I’m pretty sympathetic to that, actually. So hopefully we get to a point where Ohio bans abortion, and California and the Soroses of the world respect it.”
In 2021, the then-Senate candidate told Spectrum News he didn’t believe in exceptions to abortion restrictions for rape or incest because “two wrongs don’t make a right.”
“It’s not whether a woman should be forced to bring a child to term, it’s whether a child should be allowed to live, even though the circumstances of that child’s birth are somehow inconvenient or a problem to the society,” Vance said. “The question really, to me, is about the baby.”
Vance has also previously said he supports a national 15-week abortion ban and a “minimum national standard” for abortion.
However, he’s struck a different tone with his most recent statements, distancing himself from past comments and aligning himself with Trump’s public position on abortion: that whether and what to ban is up to the states.
“My view is that Donald Trump is the leader of the Republican Party, and his views on abortion are going to be the views that dominate this party and drive this party forward,” Vance said Monday in an interview with Fox News’ Sean Hannity. “Alabama’s going to make a different decision from California. That is a reasonable thing. And that’s how I think we build some bridges and have some respect for one another.”