Sen. Vance has stood consistently against abortion rights during his two-year political career—despite attempts to embody a congenial and reasonable version of conservatism.
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz faced Sen. JD Vance of Ohio Tuesday night at the vice presidential debate, and day-after results are showing more or less a toss-up on who won among pundits. The two candidates were grilled by CBS Evening News anchor and managing editor Norah O’Donnell and Face the Nation moderator and chief foreign affairs correspondent Margaret Brennan, on a wide range of topics, including climate change, gun control, immigration and the housing shortage. (Read a full transcript.)
Admittedly, Vance sounded coherent and slick. But much of what he said—especially on abortion, IVF and childcare—were lies, engineered for women to let their guards down and to distance himself from his extreme views, most of which are ripped right from Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership.
Project 2025 polls terribly, even among Republican voters, so the entire party is trying to downplay the now-toxic document. But in reality, the framers and masterminds of Project 2025—a project of the right-wing Heritage Foundation that calls for abortion surveillance, “biblically based marriages” and a nationwide ban on the abortion pill mifepristone—have close personal ties with Vance.
- Vance wrote the foreword for an upcoming book by Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation and architect of Project 2025.
- In April, Vance spoke at a Heritage Foundation event, and said the organization “is going to play a major role in helping [the Trump-Vance administration] figure out how to govern, at the White House, at the Senate, at the House and all across our great country.”
- The connection goes beyond his (short) political career: In 2017—five years before Vance was elected to the Senate—he wrote the introduction to a Heritage Foundation report that promoted conservative policies like banning abortion nationwide.
Throughout his two-decade political career, Vance’s Democratic counterpart has been emphatically and consistently pro-abortion. Walz calls himself an ally of the abortion rights movement and regularly discusses his and his wife Gwen’s fertility struggles and how reproductive technologies helped create their family of four.
His public actions match his words.
- During Walz’s governorship, Minnesota repealed several abortion restrictions, including a 24-hour waiting period, and passed a shield law to protect state abortion providers and patients from prosecution in other states.
- As governor, Walz enacted a law that enshrined “reproductive freedom” into the state Constitution, making abortion legal in the state without viability restrictions.
- In January 2023, Walz signed a law that ensures local authorities cannot regulate an individual’s decision to seek abortion or other reproductive healthcare—broad protections that extend to fertility treatments.
- He cut funding for a program that supported crisis pregnancy centers.
- Walz has expressed support for a bill introduced last year in the Minnesota House of Representatives that would require state health plans that offer maternity coverage to also cover fertility treatment.
Walz more or less reiterated this position Tuesday night: He spoke about the need to protect the right to abortion and IVF, and said that in Minnesota, “we trust women. We trust doctors.” He called abortion access “a basic human right,” and warned of the negative impact of abortion bans: “We have seen maternal mortality skyrocket in Texas, outpacing many other countries in the world.”
Vance, on the other hand, has stood consistently against abortion rights during his two-year political career—despite attempts Tuesday night to embody a congenial and reasonable version of conservatism.
During Vance’s campaign for Senate in 2022, he ran and won on a staunchly anti-abortion platform.
- He defended the lack of exceptions for rape and incest in Texas’ SB 8, the six-week abortion ban with the infamous bounty hunter provision, saying “two wrongs don’t make a right.”
- He equated abortion to slavery, saying both have a “morally distorting effect on the entire society.”
- In a 2022 debate, Vance said he would be “totally fine” with a “minimum national standard” on abortion laws. (Once again: a ban.)
- He also campaigned against a constitutional amendment in Ohio that guarantees a right to abortion and other forms of reproductive healthcare. (It passed anyway.) Vance called its passage last November a “gut punch.”
During Tuesday’s debate, he said as much: Vance claimed he “never supported a national ban,” then admitted support for “setting some minimum national standard”—which, of course, amounts to a ban.
He continued, “The proper way to handle this, as messy as democracy sometimes is, is to let voters make these decisions, let the individual states make their abortion policy.” As Americans have witnessed since the fall of Roe, a leave-it-to-the-states abortion position leaves women suffering consequences of extreme bans, and leaves a potential Trump-Vance presidency multiple avenues to highly restrict abortion access nationwide.
Walz pushed back and reiterated his pro-choice position: “Just mind your own business on this. Things worked best when Roe v. Wade was in place. When we do a restoration of Roe, that works best. That doesn’t preclude us from increasing funding for children. It doesn’t [stop] us from making sure that once that child’s born, like in Minnesota, they get meals, they get early childhood education, they get healthcare.”
Vance also urged on Tuesday night that he is a supporter of IVF and wants to “[make] fertility treatments more accessible.” But in June, Vance had his chance to do just that—to vote yes on a Democrat-led bill to enshrine access to in vitro fertilization. He voted against it.
Vance’s policy positions on paid FMLA and childcare were almost as incomprehensible as Trump’s rambling non-answer last month. Rather than recognizing the value of investing in the care economy, Vance’s policy priorities focus more on helping women have more children. “I want us, as a Republican Party, to be pro-family … to make it easier for moms to afford to have babies.”
Research shows policies like affordable or free childcare and guaranteed parental leave would not only enable families to afford to have children, but would relieve the financial burden parents are bearing with the children they already have. But Vance has criticized the concept of universal childcare, calling it a “massive subsidy to the lifestyle preferences of the affluent over the preferences of the middle and working class” and a “class war against normal people.”
Vance is a proponent of friend, family and neighbor (FFN) care—typically free labor performed by women. He said as much on Tuesday night: “A lot of young women would like to go back to work immediately. Some would like to spend a little time home with the kids. Some would like to spend longer at home with the kids. We should have a family care model that makes choice possible.”
Critics of Vance’s FFN care say the plan is unsustainable; Hillary Clinton called it “not in touch with what goes on in the lives and the working careers of the vast majority of Americans.” After all, many grandparents and extended family members may not be available or able to provide childcare due to their own work commitments or financial constraints.
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