Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) did his best to sanitize his party’s extreme anti-abortion record during Tuesday night’s vice presidential debate.
Vance reiterated Donald Trump’s position that abortion rights should be left to the states, but when fact-checked on his own past comments on reproductive rights, Vance either evaded or downright lied about his record.
“I never supported a national ban,” Vance said when CBS News moderators asked about his past comments supporting a federal abortion ban. “I did, when I was running for Senate in 2022, talk about setting some minimum national standard.”
Vance, who has continually said he wants women to have more children, supported a national abortion ban in 2022, saying he would “certainly” like for “abortion to be illegal nationally.” He also called for federal restrictions on traveling for abortion care and conjured an absurd fictional scenario where George Soros fills up airplanes with Black pregnant women from Ohio and flies them to California so they can get abortions.
During the debate, the Republican vice presidential candidate also emphasized that his party needs to do a better job at earning back the trust of the American people when it comes to issues of reproductive rights — a vague suggestion that he knows abortion is a weak issue for Republicans.
“We’ve got to do a better job at winning back people’s trust,” Vance said. “So many young women would love to have families. So many young women also see an unplanned pregnancy as something that’s going to destroy their livelihood, destroy their education, destroy their relationships. And we’ve got to earn people’s trust back. And that’s why Donald Trump and I are so committed to pursuing pro-family policies.”
Vance said he and Trump support pro-family policies like access to fertility treatments and child care. But in June, Vance voted against a Democratic-led bill to enshrine access to in vitro fertilization — a fertility treatment that has been at the center of the debate over reproductive health since Alabama temporarily criminalized the procedure earlier this year.
When asked earlier this year about his plan to help families with child care, Vance suggested grandparents, aunts and uncles should help people take care of their children.
Vance also denied during the debate that he supported a national registry for pregnant women — a policy proposal detailed in Project 2025 and elsewhere in Republican rhetoric as a way to track possible abortion seekers. But he has advocated for surveillance of women’s menstrual cycles to prevent them from getting abortions.
Vance was also part of a group of Republican senators who signed a letter opposing a Biden administration rule that prevents police and prosecutors from getting ahold of reproductive health care records. The rule is intended to stop medical information from being used against patients seeking legal health care, but the letter co-signed by Vance claims that the rule “unlawfully thwarts the enforcement of compassionate laws” against abortion and “directs health care providers to defy lawful court orders and search warrants.”
“Abortion is not health care — it is a brutal act that destroys the life of an unborn child and hurts women,” the letter reads.
As recently as this summer, Vance’s website stated that he is “100 percent pro-life” and “abortion has turned our society into a place where we see children as an inconvenience to be thrown away rather than a blessing to be nurtured.” The statement was removed from the site.