This week, former President Donald Trump announced his running mate, Republican Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, who does not hide his strong stance against abortion. Vance, 39, is most notorious for his 2016 memoir-turned-movie “Hillbilly Elegy,” as well as a former venture capitalist who has publicly aligned himself as a nationalist. In a November 2023 X post, he wrote: “I am as pro life as anyone, and I want to save as many babies as possible.”
Vance has also compared abortion to slavery and described Ohio’s vote to enshrine abortion rights as “a gut punch” for anti-abortion officials. Reproductive rights organizations are sounding the alarm that Vance is an extreme pick who has said that pregnancies conceived from rape or incest shouldn’t be viewed as "inconvenient.”
“If the Republican Party’s plan to come after our reproductive rights wasn’t clear enough, look no further than Trump’s VP pick, JD Vance,” Jenny Lawson, executive director for Planned Parenthood Votes, said in a media statement. “From supporting a national abortion ban, to voting to block nationwide access to IVF, Vance has consistently attacked and undermined reproductive freedom throughout his career — and he will take that dangerous record to the White House, cosigning every policy that comes his way, no matter the harm.”
As vice president, Vance could play a key role in major reproductive bills that pass through Congress in the event of a second Trump administration. In addition to serving as presiding officer, he would have the power to break a tie vote in the Senate. As Salon has previously reported, unless Democrats hold a majority of the Senate, it will be nearly impossible to pass legislation to restore Roe v. Wade or pass a bill to expand the U.S. Supreme Court — for either future president.
“He could be that break vote,” Leila Abolfazli, director of National Abortion Strategy at the National Women’s Law Center Action Fund, told Salon. “And could he be that tiebreaker for national bans? We know the anti-abortion movement wants that national ban, and we know Trump gave them what they wanted before.”
Seema Mohapatra, a health law and bioethics expert at Southern Methodist University, told Salon "with the margins the way they are" Vance "could yield an enormous amount of power."
Abolfazli added it seems pretty clear that Vance is supportive of any effort at the federal level to take away abortion rights adding that in the last 50 years, the U.S. hasn’t had an “anti-abortion administration” where there’s no Constitutional right to abortion.
“Make no mistake, Vance will gladly do the bidding of Trump and the anti-abortion movement, including allowing the government to monitor people’s pregnancies and prosecute if they miscarry, working to ban medication abortion, and eliminating access to essential health care nationwide,” Lawson said. “In contrast, we have a reproductive rights champion in Kamala Harris who has been unapologetic in the fight to restore, protect, and expand access to abortion.”
In a statement, Mini Timmaraju, president and CEO of Reproductive Freedom for All said that Trump selecting Vance is “even more evidence that a Trump administration will stop at nothing to ban all abortion.”
“Make no mistake, Trump picked him because of — not in spite of — his anti-abortion bona fides,” Timmaraju said. Despite some media outlets reporting last week that the GOP had “softened” its stance on abortion or that it “backed away” from an abortion ban, legal experts told Salon the party is still advocating for a national abortion ban — they are trying to conceal it using different language. Specifically, the Republican Party released its 16-page “Make America Great Again” policy platform ahead of the national convention stating that it supports states establishing fetal personhood through the constitution’s 14th Amendment.
Timmaraju said a Trump-Vance administration will be “the most dangerous administration for abortion and reproductive freedom in this country’s history.”
Anti-abortion organizations are applauding Vance as Trump’s pick. Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the anti-abortion group Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, called Vance “an exceptional selection” who has an “A+” on their “scorecard.” Carol Tobias, the president of National Right to Life described Vance as “committed to promoting the right to life and protecting both women and their preborn children,” and said he shares “President Trump’s commitment to nominating qualified judges who will interpret the Constitution as written and not legislate from the bench.”
Vance has notably centered his career around supporting a “traditional nuclear family” and incentivizing people to have more children. At the same time, he once said that universal daycare is a “class war against normal people” and has called for the defunding of Planned Parenthood.
“The selection of Vance as vice president reinforces that reproductive freedom, affordable child care and our very democracy are on the line,” Fatima Goss Graves, president of the National Women’s Law Center (NWLC) Action Fund, said in a media statement. “Donald Trump was always going to pick an anti-abortion, anti-gender justice extremist as his running mate – at least now we know which one.”
