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Ohio Senate candidate J.D. Vance argues against need for rape and incest exceptions in abortion laws

September 24, 2021 at 9:13 a.m. EDT
J.D. Vance, now a candidate for the GOP Senate nomination in Ohio, in Washington, D.C., in 2017. (Astrid Riecken/Astrid Riecken For The Washington Post)

J.D. Vance, the author and venture capitalist running for the GOP nomination for a Senate seat from Ohio, this week defended the Texas abortion law and argued against the need for exceptions for rape and incest in such restrictive statutes, downplaying such circumstances as “inconvenient.”

When asked during a local interview whether abortion laws should include exceptions for rape and incest, Vance, a Republican, said he thinks “two wrong don’t make a right.”

“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,” Vance told Spectrum News in Columbus on Wednesday.

“The question to me is really about the baby,” Vance added. “We want women to have opportunities, we want women to have choices, but, above all, we want women and young boys in the womb to have a right to life.”

J.D. Vance hopes that, this time, his bet on Trump-GOP politics is the right one

His comments came during a discussion of the Texas law that bans most abortions after six weeks. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) has said the law does not force victims of rape and incest to give birth, noting the six-week exception. Often, however, women do not know that soon if they are pregnant.

“I think in Texas they’re trying to make it easier for unborn babies to be born,” Vance said in the Spectrum News interview. “There is a view, common among leaders of the Democratic Party, that babies deserve no legal protections in the womb. That is a common view in the Democratic Party, and all I’m saying is that view’s wrong.”

Vance argued that society should not view “unborn babies as inconveniences to be discarded.”

Vance, the author of the 2016 bestseller “Hillbilly Elegy,” launched his Senate bid in July, joining an already crowded Republican primary field in a race to replace the retiring Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio).