Kentucky Governor Andy Andy Beshear took aim at JD Vance Tuesday for “playing the victim” on abortion after the vice-presidential hopeful lashed out at the Democrat over an early-morning TV segment.
Beshear had been a keynote speaker at the Democratic National Convention on Monday evening where he spoke forcefully about being pro-choice—and had followed three women speaking about their experience of living in states with sweeping anti-abortion measures.
They included Hadley Duvall, who was raped by her stepfather and became pregnant when she was 12, who Beshear described as “one of the bravest people I have ever met.”
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“I remember finding out I was pregnant as a 7th grader and feeling completely alone in the world,” Duvall, now an abortion rights activist, told the DNC audience on Monday.
On Tuesday morning, Beshear used Duvall’s account to attack Vance directly during an appearance on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, saying, “JD Vance calls pregnancy from rape ‘inconvenient,’ like inconvenience is traffic. Make him go through this.
“Someone being violated, someone being harmed and then telling them that they don’t have options after that, that fails any test of decency, humanity,” Beshear added. “It also shows they don’t have any empathy at all.”
That prompted Vance, who has tussled previously with Beshear over the truth about how connected he is to Appalachia, to use X to attack the Kentucky governor, claiming, “Why is @AndyBeshearKY wishing that a member of my family would get raped?!? What a disgusting person.”
In the replies to his post, many commenters focused on Vance’s previous comments, in which he told Spectrum 1 News: “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.”
Beshear made a second MSNBC appearance later in the day and launched a new salvo against Vance, this time accusing him of “playing the victim.”
Asked by Andrea Mitchell if he meant that a member of Vance’s family should be raped, Beshear said, “It’s ridiculous and it’s deflection. JD Vance knows that he and Donald Trump are so wrong on this issue that he’s trying to make himself the victim. Hadley Duvall was a victim. As a man, JD Vance will never have to face any of this personally. ”
