Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance suggested there should be a “federal response” to prevent women from traveling out of state for abortion care in a newly resurfaced clip from a 2022 podcast.
Vance appeared on Aimee Terese’s “What’s Left” podcast in January 2022 and mused on what should happen if the Supreme Court repealed Roe v. Wade. Roe was overturned months later.
“Let’s say Roe vs. Wade is overruled, Ohio bans abortion, you know, in 2022, let’s say 2024, and then every day George Soros sends a 747 to Columbus to load up disproportionately Black women to get them to go have abortions in California,” Vance, who at the time was running to represent Ohio in the Senate, said on the podcast. “Of course, the left will celebrate this as a victory for diversity … that’s kind of creepy, right?”
“If that happens, do you need some federal response to prevent it from happening because it’s really creepy?” he added. “And, you know, I’m pretty sympathetic to that, actually.”
His comments about Black women likely refer to the far-right talking point that abortion supporters use abortion as a means to Black genocide.
The Harris campaign resurfaced the podcast clip in a post on X (formerly Twitter) Thursday night.
“JD Vance’s obsession with controlling women’s most personal health care decisions, from blocking access to IVF, to tracking women’s menstrual cycles, to passing a national abortion ban to bar women from traveling to access the care they need, isn’t just bad policy — it’s creepy, it’s unacceptable, and voters won’t stand for it,” Sarafina Chitika, a spokesperson for the Harris campaign, told HuffPost.
“Women have had enough of the Trump-Vance Project 2025 ticket blocking access to critical health care, and they’re going to shut it down this November by sending Vice President Harris to the White House.”
A Senate spokesperson for Vance did not respond to HuffPost’s request for comment.
Vance is an anti-abortion hardliner who has previously advocated for “abortion to be illegal nationwide” and surveilling women’s menstrual cycles to prevent them from getting abortions, and has said he is fine with forcing a woman to stay pregnant even if she was a victim of rape or incest.
Terese, a far-right political pundit, has tweeted about putting “misogynists back in the Oval Office” and has said “we need to stop normalising consent.”
Until recently, Vance’s website stated that he is “100 percent pro-life” and “abortion has turned our society into a place where we see children as an inconvenience to be thrown away rather than a blessing to be nurtured.” The statement has since been removed from the site.
