On the debate stage Tuesday night, Sen. JD Vance found himself agreeing with his opponent, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, that a woman who died from abortion complications in 2022 due to Georgia’s draconian abortion ban should still be alive.
“Governor, I agree with you,” the Republican vice presidential nominee said. “Amber Thurman should still be alive — and there are a lot of people who should still be alive — and I certainly wish that she was.”
Vance’s acknowledgement that Thurman’s death was preventable and his expressed desire for the GOP to “earn people’s trust back” on abortion doesn’t square with Republican lawmakers actively restricting people’s ability to make such choices for themselves. After the debate, Thurman’s family issued a statement condemning the GOP for “seek[ing] to further restrict women’s access to necessary healthcare under the false guise of protection.”
“Amber’s tragic death was a direct result of Georgia’s archaic and dangerously restrictive abortion laws, which denied her the life-saving care she so desperately needed,” Thurman’s family said. “We are grieving an unimaginable loss that no family should have to endure.”
In the debate, Vance said that the American people “just don’t trust” Republicans when it comes to abortion, and that he wanted the GOP to become “pro-family in the fullest sense of the word.” He also claimed that he has never supported a federal abortion ban (Vance did, however, say as recently as 2022 that he “would like abortion to be illegal nationally”) and defended the overturning of Roe v. Wade.
After lamenting Thurman’s death, Vance immediately went on to talk about “partial birth abortion,” a highly misleading political term that refers to an abortion that happens later in pregnancy. He also asserted that allowing states to impose their own abortion laws is the right thing to do, despite that being exactly the circumstance that led to Thurman’s death.