Ohio Sen. JD Vance, the Republican nominee for vice president, said he will “absolutely commit” to not implementing a federal abortion ban two years after saying he’d like “abortion to be illegal nationally.”
While appearing on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday, Vance vouched for former President Donald Trump, telling moderator Kristen Welker that he believes Trump would veto a federal abortion ban if he’s elected president in the fall.
“I think he would,” Vance told Welker after she pressed him about his party’s efforts to propel a bill restricting abortion access nationwide. “He said that explicitly that he would.”
“And to be clear, Donald Trump, I think, has staked his position and made it very explicit. He wants this to be a state decision. States are going to make this determination themselves,” he added after Welker noted that Democrats have been warning that a second Trump term would lead to a national abortion ban.
Vance doubled down on the hypothetical bill by arguing that the Republican Party doesn’t want a “nonstop federal conflict over this issue.”
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) also made an appearance on “Meet the Press” and slammed Vance’s remarks that Trump would shoot down a federal abortion ban if he’s elected.
“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.
Back in March, Trump suggested he’d support a national ban on abortions around 15 weeks of pregnancy, with exceptions for rape, incest and the life of the mother.
“The number of weeks, now, people are agreeing on 15, and I’m thinking in terms of that, and it’ll come out to something that’s very reasonable,” he said on WABC’s “Sid & Friends in the Morning.” “But people are really — even hardliners are agreeing, seems to be 15 weeks, seems to be a number that people are agreeing at.”
Then, in April, he updated his position, saying that states should decide their own abortion laws.