J.D. Vance Endorsed a National Abortion Ban in the Grossest Way Possible
In 2022, then-Senate candidate J.D. Vance sat down with Aimee Terese — a pundit and podcaster little known to the American public, but prominent in the sloppy trenches of hyper-online digital reactionaries — and removed his filter.
“I certainly would like abortion to be illegal nationally,” Vance said in the episode, explaining why regulating abortion at the state level wouldn’t work. “Let’s say Roe v. Wade is overruled,” he said. “Ohio bans abortion … you know, 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.”
It wasn’t the only time that Vance would express support for a national abortion ban: Later that year, he characterized a 15-week national abortion ban proposed by Sen. Lindsey Graham as “totally reasonable.”
Now, Vance is running on the Republican ticket with Donald Trump, who is attempting to run as an abortion “moderate” despite appointing three Supreme Court justices who were integral to overturning Roe v. Wade. As such, Vance’s history as an anti-abortion hardliner — who compared abortion to slavery — is being rewritten and sanitized.
On Monday, The New York Times erroneously wrote that “Mr. Vance, like Mr. Trump, opposes a national abortion ban, saying the issue should now be left to the states.” (The piece has since been corrected.)
But the state-by-state approach, the one panned by Vance, isn’t a moderate policy by any means, and is in fact quite cruel.
The news that came out of Ohio after Roe was overturned and the state banned the procedure wasn’t George Soros loading up 747s in Columbus to transport women to California for abortions. No, the national news story out of Ohio was about a 10-year-old girl who had to travel to Indiana for an abortion, after she was raped by her mother’s boyfriend. (Vance called this story “tragic,” before blaming it on Democrats allowing undocumented immigrants into the country.)
In the podcast, Vance continued on with his hypothetical about California and Soros, a Democratic megadonor and perpetual bogeyman for the right. “If that happens, do you need some federal response to prevent it from happening?” he asked. “Because it’s really creepy.”
“Hopefully we get to a point where Ohio bans abortion and California and the Soroses of the world respect it,” he said.
Last year, after Ohio voters enshrined the right to abortion access in the state’s constitution through a ballot referendum, Vance was distraught. “For pro lifers, last night was a gut punch. No sugar coating it,” he wrote in a lengthy post on X, formerly Twitter. “We’ve spent so much time winning a legal argument on abortion that we’ve fallen behind on the moral argument.”
“There is something sociopathic about a political movement that tells young women (and men) that it is liberating to murder their own children,” he added. “So let’s keep fighting for our country’s children, and let’s find a way to win.”
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