J.D. Vance once compared abortion to slavery while gushing about the demise of Roe v. Wade, in new audio unearthed by Media Matters.
Less than two weeks after the U.S. Supreme Court decided to undo the 1973 decision that decriminalized abortion, Vance appeared in an episode of The Bruce Hooley Show, hosted by the eponymous right-wing radio host.
During the conversation, Hooley cited the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which found that “separate but equal” segregation was unconstitutional, although it had previously been allowed by Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896.
“I don’t think they wanna be in the business of advocating that anything that’s been in law for 50 years remains in law forever,” Hooley said.
Vance agreed, and took it another step further.
“Yeah. Of course. You know, Dred Scott, one of the famous pro-slavery decisions by the Supreme Court, I don’t think anybody wants that to remain law,” Vance said, referring to the 1857 case Dred Scott v. Sandford, which found that enslaved Black people were not American citizens and therefore not protected by the Constitution.
“So, I do think that we look at these decisions very often and we say, look, these things just don’t make any sense anymore. They haven’t held up very well. They haven’t solved the problem they were meant to solve. They don’t comport with the Constitution, obviously. That’s the most important thing that very few people talk about.”
“So, yeah, this is ultimately—this is a good thing,” said Vance, referring to Roe’s fall.
Media Matters found that this wasn’t the first time that Vance made that comparison.
In 2021, Vance had told The Catholic Current, an anti-abortion radio show, that “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’s harsh view on abortion is a particularly bad look for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, which has attempted to present a more moderate approach on abortion in an attempt to capture a wider breadth of voters. The change in tone has inspired a huge shift in the Republican Party’s platform away from a federal abortion ban (and toward embracing the dozens of cruel state-level ones).
Vance previously advocated for a nationwide abortion ban, and called for a “federal response” to block women traveling out of state to get abortions.
