A Trump-Vance administration would be ‘the most dangerous’ for abortion rights, say advocates

Within minutes of Donald Trump's announcement that he had tapped Ohio senator JD Vance as his running mate in the 2024 elections, abortion rights groups vociferously condemned the pick.

"A Trump-Vance administration will be the most dangerous administration for abortion and reproductive freedom in this country's history," Mini Timmaraju, president and CEO of Reproductive Freedom for All, said in a statement.

"By naming Vance to his ticket, Trump made clear that his administration will sign a national abortion ban and put birth control and IVF at risk," said Jessica Mackler, president of Emily's List, an organization that supports Democratic women who support abortion rights running for office.

Vance, the venture capitalist turned Hillbilly Elegy author turned GOP standard-bearer, has long opposed abortion.

In 2021, while running for Ohio senate, Vance told an Ohio news outlet that he did not support rape and incest exceptions in abortion bans. "It's not whether a woman should be forced to bring a child to term," he said. "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."

But voters' outrage over the overturning of Roe v Wade has grown, leading abortion rights supporters to a string of victories at the ballot box, and harnessing that outrage is widely considered Democrats' best hope for winning the November elections. As Trump and other Republicans have tried to project a moderated stance on the issue - despite the fact that Trump handpicked three of the supreme court justices who overturned Roe - Vance has also tempered his public position.

"We have to accept that people do not want blanket abortion bans. They just don't," Vance told CNN's Jake Tapper last year. "I say this as a person who wants to protect as many unborn babies as possible. We have to provide exceptions for the life of the mother and rape and so forth."