Former President Donald Trump's running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), told an interviewer that women should be forced to continue pregnancies from rape and incest, even if it is "inconvenient" to them.
The clip at Spectrum News 1, unearthed by progressive Ohio operative Terra Goodnight, comes from 2021, around two months after Vance, a venture capitalist and the author of "Hillbilly Elegy," first announced his run for Senate, and several months before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade — but after the justices had effectively allowed a total ban on abortion to go into effect in the state of Texas, which Vance was asked about.
When the subject came to whether abortion should be permissible in cases or rape or incest, Vance said, "Two wrongs don't make a right. At the end of the day, we're talking about an unborn baby. What kind of society do we want to have? A society that looks at unborn babies as inconveniences to be discarded?"
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"Should a woman be forced to carry a child to term after she has been the victim of incest or rape?" he was then asked.
"Look, my view on this has been very clear, and I think the question betrays a certain presumption that's wrong," said Vance. "It’s not whether a woman should be forced to carry 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. The question really to me is 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 the right to life. Right now, our society doesn't afford that. I think it's a tragedy, and I think we can do better."
In other interviews, Vance hasn't gone quite so far as endorsing a total, no-exceptions national ban on abortion, but has supported there being some form of national restriction on abortion to prevent people from traveling across state lines to get the procedure.
This comes as Vance faces scrutiny for a number of other controversial political positions, including his attacks on "childless cat ladies" and his suggestion that the government should give people with children more votes than people without.
