Vice: JD Vance Compared Abortion to Slavery
July 7, 2022
For Immediate Release:
July 7, 2022
Columbus, OH – A newly uncovered interview first reported by Vice reveals that JD Vance said, “There’s something comparable between abortion and slavery… it has this morally distorting effect on the entire society.”
The overturning of Roe v. Wade and the implementation of Ohio’s six-week abortion ban – which recently forced a 10-year-old girl to travel out of state to get an abortion after being raped – put Vance’s extreme anti-abortion comments into even sharper focus. In addition to comparing abortion to chattel slavery, Vance has said “two wrongs don’t make a right” when explaining why he wants to force survivors of rape and incest to give birth and called rape “inconvenient.”
“J.D. Vance is dangerous and belongs nowhere near the U.S. Senate,” said Michael Beyer, a spokesperson for the Ohio Democratic Party.
Vice: JD Vance Compared Abortion to Slavery
Cameron Joseph
July 7, 2022
- JD Vance compared abortion to slavery in an interview last fall, drawing a controversial parallel between America’s original sin and a procedure that until recently was a constitutional right.
- “There’s something comparable between abortion and slavery, and that while the people who obviously suffer the most are those subjected to it, I think it has this morally distorting effect on the entire society,” Vance, the GOP nominee for an open Ohio Senate seat, said in an interview with the Catholic Current last October.
- Vance then referenced Abraham Lincoln’s quote “I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master,” before arguing that because of abortion, many Americans have “begun to see children as inconveniences to be discarded, instead of blessings to cherish.”
- “I really think abortion has really done something very socially destructive to us as people in how we see the most vulnerable and the most dependent among us,” Vance continued. “I think that’s one of the under-appreciated facts about abortion. It’s really distorted our entire society.”
- The Supreme Court’s recent decision to overturn a half-century of precedent and allow states to back abortion has significantly raised the stakes on the issue in both state and federal elections—especially since some congressional Republicans already working on legislation to ban abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy at the national level.
- Vance’s own state now has a six-week abortion ban in place, with no exceptions for rape and incest. That law reportedly recently blocked a ten-year-old girl who’d been raped from getting an abortion; she had to travel to another state to obtain one.
- Vance seems to oppose such exceptions in abortion bans. When asked last fall about including exceptions in cases of rape and incest in abortion bans, he replied that “two wrong[s] don’t make a right.”
- “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,” Vance said.
- Vance’s campaign did not respond to questions from VICE News about his abortion comments.
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