JD Vance Tries to Hide His Hard-Line Anti-Abortion Record by Coopting Democratic Talking Points

AMY GOODMAN: As we continue to look at last night’s CBS News vice-presidential debate, we turn to the issue of abortion. This is Republican Senator JD Vance.

SEN. JD VANCE: Now, of course, Donald Trump has been very clear that on the abortion policy specifically, that we have a big country, and it’s diverse. And California has a different viewpoint on this than Georgia. Georgia has a different viewpoint from Arizona. And the proper way to handle this, as messy as democracy sometimes is, is to let voters make these decisions, let the individual states make their abortion policy. And I think that’s what makes the most sense in a very big, a very diverse and, let’s be honest, sometimes a very, very messy and divided country.

MARGARET BRENNAN: Governor, would you like to respond and also answer the question —

GOV. TIM WALZ: Yeah.

MARGARET BRENNAN: — about restrictions?

GOV. TIM WALZ: Yeah. Well, the question got asked, and Donald Trump made the accusation that wasn’t true about Minnesota. Well, let me tell you about this idea that there’s diverse states. There’s a young woman named Amber Thurman. She happened to be in Georgia, a restrictive state. Because of that, she had to travel a long distance to North Carolina to try and get her care. Amber Thurman died in that journey back and forth. The fact of the matter is, how can we as a nation say that your life and your rights, as basic as the right to control your own body, is determined on geography? There’s a very real chance, had Amber Thurman lived in Minnesota, she would be alive today.

AMY GOODMAN: So, that’s Walz; before that, JD Vance. Amy Littlefield is abortion access correspondent at The Nation, independent journalist who covers reproductive health, joining us from Boston. Your response to this discussion and the stance of these candidates?

AMY LITTLEFIELD: I thought it was so powerful, Amy, to hear Amber Thurman’s name from the debate stage — right? — two weeks after ProPublica published the report that this young mother had had to travel to North Carolina for an abortion. She had suffered a complication that’s rare when she was back home in Georgia. And because the state of Georgia had made the simple procedure that would have saved her life a felony, she died and left behind a 6-year-old child. You know, Walz also could have mentioned Candi Miller, who, ProPublica reported — who had died with her 3-year-old daughter by her side after suffering the same rare complication in a state that banned abortion at six weeks. Worth noting, Amy, by the way, that a judge in Georgia just this week struck down the state’s six-week abortion ban as unconstitutional, the law that killed Amber Thurman.

You know, I have to say, Amy, watching this debate, I felt like I was in a nightmare version of my high school sex ed class, watching, you know, Coach Tim Walz chastise the smug kid in the back of the room who had gotten caught copying off of his classmate’s paper, because what JD Vance seemed to be doing in this debate — and, frankly, he was very good at it — is trying to coopt the Democratic talking points at some times on abortion and trying to make his stance look moderate, because, quite frankly, his own hard-line position on abortion has flunked with the American people. You know, he got everyone from Taylor Swift and beyond mad at him. And, you know, cats and women, we don’t forget, Amy. We know where JD Vance stands on abortion.

We know that he spent his Saturday hanging out with leaders of the New Apostolic Reformation, a far-right strain of Christianity that believes that people like you and I, who espouse anything that looks left-leaning, are literally infested with demons that need to be vanquished through spiritual warfare. This is the kind of company that JD Vance keeps.

But I’m going to say probably the most terrifying words I’ve ever said on this program before, Amy, which is JD Vance sounded good at trying to convince us that he was more moderate than he actually is on the issue of abortion, because, unlike Donald Trump, JD Vance seems quite skilled at code-switching. And I have to say I think the three most frightening words that JD Vance said from the debate stage were “I am 40.” OK? Unlike Donald Trump, not only is he good at code-switching and hiding what he actually believes, but JD Vance is going to be with us for a long time.

AMY GOODMAN: Yeah, I wanted to go to something that was on Vance’s website. In July, Jennifer Bendery, the senior politics reporter for HuffPost, tweeted a screenshot from Vance’s Senate campaign website, before it was wiped, that described his views on abortion under the all-caps title ”END ABORTION.” That was on his website. It read, in part, “Eliminating abortion is first and foremost about protecting the unborn, but it’s also about making our society more pro-child and pro-family. The historic Dobbs decision puts this new era of society into motion, one that prioritizes family and the sanctity of … life.” And then, last night, Trump tweeted during and after the debate — and it seems like it’s the first time he said this — “I would not support a federal abortion ban, under any circumstances, and would, in fact, veto it,” because he wants the states to decide. Your response?

AMY LITTLEFIELD: Right. I mean, we know that Vance has said he’s sympathetic to the idea that a national abortion ban would be needed to prevent women from traveling out of state in order to seek an abortion, right? We know that Vance has said of rape and incest exceptions that two wrongs don’t make a right. We know, you know, that he is hard-line when it comes to being anti-abortion.

We know the strategy here, because they wrote it down. It’s in a more than 900-page document called Project 2025 that talks about the need to ban abortion nationwide, not using an act of Congress or the people, but using the 1873 Comstock Act and reviving that as a de facto ban on mailing abortion pills. So, you know, we have to look at the strategy here and not get distracted by the slick talking points.

AMY GOODMAN: And finally, this all happened yesterday. Well, Louisiana instituted — it’s the first-in-the-nation law that bans abortion medications, calling them “dangerous.” And they are used for a number of different issues. The significance of this, in 15 seconds?

AMY LITTLEFIELD: I mean, we have to look at the recent report from Pregnancy Justice that found that there was a record-high number of instances of pregnancy-related prosecutions over the year after the Dobbs decision, at least 210. So, this is the collision of the war on drugs with anti-abortion policies that always affects low-income people and the most marginal people first.

AMY GOODMAN: Amy Littlefield, abortion access correspondent at The Nation, an independent journalist who covers reproductive health.

That does it for our show. Democracy Now! will be doing a four-hour election night special on November 5th, followed by a two-hour morning show the next day. Democracy Now! produced with Mike Burke, Renée Feltz, Deena Guzder, Messiah Rhodes, Nermeen Shaikh, Tami Woronoff. I’m Amy Goodman. Thanks for joining us.