Republican vice presidential hopeful JD Vance revealed Tuesday that an unnamed person “very dear” to him previously got an abortion during a discussion about the politically fraught issue at Tuesday’s debate against Democrat Tim Walz.
“I grew up in a working-class family in a neighborhood where I knew a lot of young women who had unplanned pregnancies and decided to terminate those pregnancies because they feel like they didn’t have any other options,” Vance said.
“One of them is actually very dear to me, and I know she’s watching tonight, and I love you.”
Vance did not specify who he was talking about, though he added that she was in “an abusive relationship.”
He also stressed his position is that states should decide abortion policy rather than the federal government.
“We’ve got to do so much better of a job at [winning] the American people’s trust back on this issue where they frankly, just don’t trust us,” Vance said of the Republican Party.
“I want us as a Republican Party, to be pro-family in the fullest sense of the word,” he elaborated. “I want us to support fertility treatments. I want us to make it easier for moms to afford to have babies. I wanted to make it easier for young families to afford a home, so they can afford a place to raise that family.”
“I think there’s so much that we can do on the public policy front just to give women more options,” he added.
![“We’ve got to do so much better of a job at [winning] the American people’s trust back on this issue where they frankly, just don’t trust us,” Vance said of the Republican Party.](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/10/minnesota-governor-democratic-vice-presidential-90847240.jpg?w=1024)
Vance later slammed Walz’s abortion laws in Minnesota, which he said allowed doctors to let babies who are born alive during botched abortions die.
“As I read the Minnesota law that you signed,” Vance told Walz, “it says the doctor who presides over an abortion where the baby survives, the doctor is under no obligation to provide life-saving care to a baby who survives a botched late-term abortion.
“That is fundamentally barbaric,” he declared. “Do you want to force Catholic hospitals to perform abortions against their will? Because Kamala Harris has supported suing Catholic nuns to violate their freedom of conscience.”
Walz protested that was “not true,” but did not explain how Vance’s reading of the Minnesota law was flawed.
“These are womens’ decisions to make,” the governor added. “”And the physicians who know best.”
“I asked a question, and you gave me a slogan,” Vance responded.
Walz also charged that if former President Donald Trump were to be elected, he would create a national registry of pregnancies to keep track of women who might potentially seek abortions.
“Their Project 2025 is going to have a registry of pregnancies,” Walz claimed. “It’s going to make it more difficult, if not impossible, to get contraception and limit access, if not eliminate access, to infertility treatments.”
Trump, 78, has repeatedly disavowed the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 document. And on Tuesday, Vance also denied that he or Trump had any intention of creating a database that tracks pregnant women.
“For so many of you out there listening, me included, infertility treatments are why we have a child,” Walz said, referencing his wife, Gwen’s use of intrauterine insemination to conceive their two children.
The Minnesota governor also highlighted the case of Amber Thurman, a 28-year-old Georgia woman who died in August of 2022 after suffering an infection after taking abortion pills that did not expel all the fetal tissue from her body.
Vice President Kamala Harris has previously blamed Trump for Thurman’s tragic death.
“She happened to be in Georgia, a restrictive state,” Walz said. “Because of that, she had to travel a long distance to North Carolina to try and get her care.”
“Amber Thurman died in that journey back and forth,” he added.
Several doctors and anti-abortion groups have argued that Thurman’s death was the result of medical error and the use of high-risk abortion drugs, noting that under Georgia law removing the fetal tissue that caused Thurman’s infection would not have been considered an abortion under Georgia law.