Elizabeth Warren says “American women are not stupid” and therefore do not believe JD Vance’s promise that Donald Trump would veto any nationwide abortion ban passed by Congress if the Republican presidential ticket wins November’s election.
“American women are not stupid, and we are not going to trust the futures of our daughters and granddaughters to two men who have openly bragged about blocking access to abortion for women all across this country,” Warren said on Sunday on NBC’s Meet the Press.
The Democratic US senator from Massachusetts added that she suspects conservative activists could use the Comstock Act, a 19th-century anti-obscenity law which bans mailing abortion-related materials, to enforce a federal ban on abortion if the former president clinches a second presidency with Vance as his running mate. She said it would not be all that “hard to accomplish” with “the right person [in] the Department of Justice and one of their extremist judges out in the world”.
“Understand this: today 30% of all women live in states that effectively ban abortion,” Warren said, referring to how 14 US states have enacted near-total bans on the procedure since the 2022 US supreme court ruling that eliminated federal abortion rights. “Donald Trump and JD Vance in the White House – it won’t be 30%. It’ll be 100%.”
Warren’s remarks came in response to a separate Meet the Press interview with Vance in which he was asked whether Trump, if elected again to the Oval Office, would use the presidency’s veto powers overrule a congressional federal abortion ban.
“I think he would,” Vance told Meet the Press host Kristen Welker in a pre-recorded clip which the show began promoting on Saturday. “He said … explicitly that he would.”
Trump himself pledged in April that he would not sign a national abortion ban into law, with polling showing a clear majority of Americans favor abortion being legal in all or most cases. But Democrats maintain that he is lying.
They point out that Trump has spoken proudly of his three supreme court appointees who formed part of the conservative majority that dissolved the federal abortion rights previously established by the Roe v Wade decision in 1973.
And they note how the 900-page Project 2025 plan drafted by a conservative thinktank that supports Trump calls for the Food and Drug Administration to completely revoke its approval of the abortion medication mifepristone.
Project 2025 also discusses using the Comstock Act to criminally prosecute people who send abortion pills or tools through the mail. Vance in 2023 joined 40 of his fellow Republican lawmakers calling on US justice department prosecutors to investigate pursuing physicians, pharmacists and others “who break the federal mail-order abortion laws”.
In June, Warren – a 2020 Democratic presidential primary candidate – helped introduce legislation aiming to repeal the Comstock Act. It has not garnered the 60 votes necessary to advance bills in the Senate. But part of the proposed bill’s strategy was to raise awareness of the Comstock Act’s consequences for the 168 million women living in the US – a country of 333 million.
According to Warren on Sunday, the only way to protect abortion access in the US was to elect the Democratic nominee, Kamala Harris, over Trump – as well as a Congress with a clear liberal majority that would pass laws enshrining the right to access abortion-related care nationwide.
“She will sign it into law,” Warren said. “And then we will restore a right to half the population in this country.”
• The headline and introduction of this article were amended on 27 and 29 August 2024 to more accurately reflect Elizabeth Warren’s quote.
