ODP Statement On Vance Calling Rape “Inconvenient”
September 23, 2021
Columbus, OH — Following a new Daily Beast report that J.D. Vance called rape “inconvenient,” Ohio Democratic Party Chair Liz Walters released the following statement:
“J.D. Vance’s statement is dangerous and despicable. He is unfit to serve in the United States Senate.”
Read the report below:
Daily Beast: J.D. Vance Defends Texas Abortion Ban, Calls Rape “Inconvenient”
In a local news interview published Wednesday, author and venture capitalist turned Senate candidate J.D. Vance suggested he would support prohibiting abortion even in cases of rape and incest—and dismissed those catalysts as “inconvenient.”
Asked by Curtis Jackson of Spectrum News 1 in Columbus, OH, whether a woman should be forced to give birth even if the pregnancy was the result of incest or rape, Vance replied that “the question betrays a certain presumption that’s wrong.”
“It’s not whether a woman should be forced to bring a child to term; it’s whether a child should be allowed to live, even though the circumstances of that child’s birth are somehow inconvenient or a problem to the society,” said Vance, who lags behind several Republican candidates in his Ohio primary. “The question to me is really about the baby. We want women to have opportunities, we want women to have choices, but, above all, we want women and young boys in the womb to have a right to life.”
The exchange came amid an extended discussion about abortion laws in light of the broadly criticized new Texas ban on the procedure, which does not make exceptions for rape and incest. Vance, a multimillionaire investor whose 2016 bestseller, Hillbilly Elegy, detailed the plight of Appalachia’s poor, defended the ban, saying that “in Texas they’re trying to make it easier for babies to be born.”
He also claimed, falsely, that “the Supreme Court has upheld the Texas law,” referring to the Court’s eleventh-hour split decision last month to let the ban go into effect rather than issue an emergency injunction. Vance, a Yale Law grad, also stated that “the fundamental problem with abortion law in this country” is that it is “unsustainable and unstable.” Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court ruling which defined those laws, was decided 48 years ago.
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