JD Vance sprinted to the center in his vice presidential debate with Tim Walz on Tuesday night with a rambling answer cleaning up his past right-wing statements on abortion.
Asked by the moderators if he would “create a federal pregnancy monitoring agency,” the Ohio senator shook off the question.
“Certainly we won’t,” he said. “And I want to talk about this issue, ‘cause I know a lot of Americans care about it and I know a lot of Americans don’t agree with everything that I’ve ever said about this topic.”
Vance once suggested “two wrongs don’t make a right” when it comes to rape and incest survivors seeking abortions. He previously supported a national limit of 15 weeks on abortion. Until after he was selected as Trump’s running mate this year, his campaign website included a plan to “end abortion.”
But on Tuesday, Vance failed to offer a clear vision on the abortion rights and limits he would support, instead ping-ponging between talking points. He started by speaking about a young woman he knew growing up who got an abortion.
“She told me something a couple years ago,” Vance recalled. “That she felt like if she hadn’t had an abortion, that it would have destroyed her life because she was in an abusive relationship.”
But he didn’t seem to draw any lesson from that conversation about whether and when women should be allowed to have abortions.
“What I take from that, as a Republican who proudly wants to protect innocent life in this country, who proudly wants to protect the vulnerable, is that my party, we’ve got to do so much better of a job at earning the American people’s trust back on this issue where they frankly, just don’t trust us,” Vance said.
From there, he continued to avoid nailing down his ideal abortion policy, instead listing other ways the Republican Party could be pro-family.
“I think there’s so much that we can do on the public policy front just to give women more options,” he said.
Vance went on to say “Donald Trump has been very clear” about letting individual states make decisions on abortion rights, adding that he thinks that makes sense. When the moderator brought up the gap between that stance and his previous position, he said Ohio’s decision to vote against his position on abortion rights led him to change his view.
How exactly that happened, Vance didn’t say.
“So many young women would love to have families,” he said. “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 have got to earn people’s trust back. That’s why Donald Trump and I are committed to pursuing pro-family policies, making child care more accessible, making fertility treatments more accessible, because we’ve got to do a better job of that.”
