Republican Vice Presidential Candidate JD Vance has a refrain he likes to repeat when asked about his questions. Strict anti-abortion stance and former President Donald Trump’s plan for reproductive rights: Leave it to the states.
Here’s essentially what he said during the game against Minnesota: Gov. Tim Walz was asked during Tuesday night’s vice presidential debate by moderator Norah O’Donnell whether he would create a federal pregnancy monitoring agency. While Vance said he would not create such an institution, he went on to say: “Because democracy is messy sometimes, the appropriate way to handle this is to let voters make these decisions and let individual states create their abortion policies.”
In some ways, Vance makes sense. Every state that has put the abortion rights issue to voters since 2022, when the Supreme Court overturned the ruling. Roe vs. WadeThe bill passed very successfully. And that includes Vance’s home state of Ohio, as my colleague Madison Pauly previously reported.
But there’s a problem. Republicans continue to try to block abortion rights ballot measures. before They even reach out to voters. They did so in Ohio last year by holding an August special election to raise the threshold for a state constitutional amendment. At the time we wrote:
Republicans in the Ohio state legislature tried to change the rules before voters got a chance to vote on abortion rights. Last May, they passed a resolution to force a statewide vote on whether to make it more difficult to pass future amendments. They argued that their effort, which was funded by far-right Illinois billionaire Richard Uihlein, was aimed at blocking interference from “out-of-state special interest groups.” But they specifically made sure that the votes were cast.theirThe proposal was made before the abortion rights vote last November. To that end, they approved legislation this spring to restart August by-elections. They just eliminated summer elections on the theory that turnout would be too low to be worth the cost. (“These unnecessary ‘off-cycle’ elections are not good for taxpayers, election officials, or the health of the citizens of our state. It’s time for them to step aside!” LaRose, who is running for Senate, previously argued.)
The effort supported by Vance was not successful. surprising Many Ohioans blocked and defeated attempts to block an abortion rights ballot measure. I passed by a large margin. In Ohio, access to abortion is now protected until the fetus is likely to survive, usually around 24 weeks of pregnancy. The law also allows late-term abortions to protect the lives and health of pregnant women.
Ohio Republicans aren’t alone in their efforts to weaken voting measures. As Madison writes, Missouri Republicans tried and failed to do the same with an upcoming abortion ballot measure as did South Dakota Republicans. In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis and his allies recently attempted to disrupt the state’s upcoming abortion rights vote by potentially violating the law and sending police to the homes of abortion rights supporters. As I recently reported:
The state Department of Health has released a webpage spreading misinformation about Amendment 4, a ballot measure that emerged in November to invalidate the state’s six-week abortion ban approved by the Florida Supreme Court in April. If it gets 60% of the vote, the amendment would guarantee the right to an abortion before so-called fetal viability, usually understood to be around the 24th week of pregnancy. But the state’s new webpage, which DeSantis has defended as a “public service announcement,” attacks the plan with a litany of false claims, including that it “endangers the safety of women” and that it “eliminates parental consent” for minors seeking abortions. Allowing people without medical expertise to perform the procedure could “lead to unregulated and unsafe abortions.”
Meanwhile, in Kansas, where voters supported abortion rights in just two months. DobbsRepublicans have repeatedly sought to ban the procedure, including overriding Gov. Laura Kelly’s veto of the anti-abortion measure.
If abortion policy were to be decided by a democratic process, as Vance suggests, it would be legal nationwide, which polls show is favored by a majority of Americans. But anything short of that would leave reproductive rights to the states, as Vance said. And Republicans in these states show no interest in letting voters have their say without a fight.
