Donald Trump’s running mate, J.D. Vance, has repeatedly shifted his position on abortion, which has now conveniently lined-up with his counterpart on the ticket.
In a Meet the Press interview last weekend, the Ohio senator left no daylight between himself and the former president on the issue.
“We have to have an important conversation in this country about what our abortion policy should be,” Vance said. “Donald Trump is the pragmatic leader here. He’s saying most abortion policy is going to be decided by the states. We want to make it easier and more affordable for young women and parents to have families to begin with.”
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He also said that, like Trump, he supports the availability of mifepristone, a pill that can end a pregnancy in its early stages.
But Vance’s record reveals a politician who seems more than willing to go where the winds blow when it comes to one of the most divisive and strongly-felt issues in American politics.
Before entering politics, Vance spoke little about abortion. His book was more concerned with economic struggles in middle America, and a column he briefly wrote for the New York Times between 2016 and 2017 mentioned the word only once, a quick reference in a larger examination of faith among the white working class.
Speaking to The Daily Beast in 2022, Vance said his views on abortion were “absolutely” shaped by his mamaw, who helped raise him.
“My mamaw, until very late in life, she was pro-choice,” Vance said. “I think her views changed a little bit over time. People talk a lot about the number of miscarriages she had. I knew that she had a lot, and I knew it was definitely a traumatic thing for her.”
Vance grew up in an evangelical community, living between his hometown of Middletown, Ohio and Jackson, Kentucky, where he stayed with his grandparents in the summers. The people he was surrounded by were conservatives, the sort of people who might be motivated by abortion as he described in his Times column. By the time Vance graduated Yale Law School and became the author of Hillbilly Elegy, he put some distance between himself and his religious upbringing.
“I eventually got to the point where I was like, ‘Well, if I can’t believe in the Big Bang Theory and be a good Christian, then maybe I’m not a good Christian,’” he told The Washington Post in 2016.
In the same interview, he said he’d spent the past year going to church, but was not active in any denomination. He told the Post he was thinking about converting to Catholicism, and did so in 2019.
“I became persuaded over time that Catholicism was true,” he said at the time.
Not long after, he decided to get into politics. When he jumped into the race for Ohio’s open Senate seat in 2021, he faced a competitive primary. The state by then had come off many operatives’ battleground maps with an R+6 rating from the Cook Political Report. That left Vance and his Republican allies scrambling as far right as they could.
In the fall of 2021, after Texas passed a trigger law 6-week abortion ban without exceptions for rape or incest, a reporter asked Vance whether such laws should have those exemptions.
“Two wrongs don’t make a right,” he said. “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.”
The issues page of his Senate campaign website still includes an “End Abortion” heading, under which Vance says he is “100 percent pro-life,” and praises Dobbs.
“Eliminating abortion is first and foremost about protecting the unborn, but it’s also about making our society more pro-child and pro-family,” the page reads.
Vance ultimately won the Republican primary with less than a third of the vote. In October, he came out in support of a national 15-week ban on elective abortions.
The Biden-Harris campaign wasted no time Monday attacking Trump’s choice as a danger to women’s health care and reproductive rights.
“He’s proudly anti-choice and wants to take women back decades. He supports a nationwide ban on abortion,” Biden-Harris campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon said during a call with reporters on Monday.
But facing the whole electorate during the 2022 general election, Vance hedged. He said he’d “like it to be primarily a state issue,” explaining Ohio would have a different policy from California. And in a a debate with the Democratic nominee, he added that he backed certain exceptions, such as for a 10-year-old rape victim, though he did not specify which exceptions he supported.
In 2023, after Ohio voters enshrined abortion rights in the state constitution, an amendment he opposed, Vance seemed to shift a little more. He started aligning himself more closely with Trump, reiterating the former president’s claim that “you've got to have the exceptions,” Vance said that “restrictions very early in pregnancy with exceptions” could be an attractive option for voters, while “a heartbeat bill with no exceptions” could not. The Texas bill he had defended just two years before was essentially the latter.
The pivot came long before he needed it, but it wasn’t the last time, somebody would try to make his stance more palatable.
In late June, someone using a top Trump spokesman’s name as an alias edited Vance’s Wikipedia page to say that he believes abortion policy should be made in the states, The Daily Caller reported. The spokesperson denied he had made the edit.
