Vance-Walz spar over abortion, censorship, ‘historic immigration crisis' in VP debate

By Ryan Foley, Christian Post Reporter Wednesday, October 02, 2024

Abortion rights and pro-life supporters clash outside the Supreme Court on April 24, 2024, in Washington, D.C. The Supreme Court hears oral arguments today on Moyle v. United States and Idaho v. United States to decide if Idaho emergency rooms can provide abortions to pregnant women during an emergency using a federal law known as the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act to supersede a state law that criminalizes most abortions in Idaho. | Andrew Harnik/Getty Images

2. Candidates spar over abortion

When the topic turned to abortion, Walz rejected the allegation from Trump that he believes “abortion ‘in the ninth month’ is absolutely fine.” Asserting “that’s not what the bill says,” Walz defended what O’Donnell described as “one of the least restrictive” laws on abortion that he approved after the United States Supreme Court overturned the Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion nationwide: “What we did was restore Roe v. Wade. We made sure that we put women in charge of their healthcare.”

Vance pushed back on Walz’s insistence that a Trump administration would implement “a registry of pregnancies” and limit contraception and infertility treatments: “I want us, as a Republican Party, to be pro-family in the fullest sense of the word. I want us to support fertility treatments. I want us to make it easier for moms to afford to have babies. I want to make it easier for young families to afford a home so they can afford a place to raise that family.”

“I think there’s so much that we can do on the public policy front just to give women more options,” he added. Vance also brought up “making childcare more accessible” as another policy that a Trump-Vance administration would support. After Vance characterized the Democrats as “pro-abortion,” Walz countered, “No, we’re not, we’re pro-woman, we’re pro-freedom to make your own choice.”

Walz suggested that failure to embrace what he called a “pro-freedom” position on abortion leads to “women having miscarriages, women not getting the care [and] physicians feeling like they may be prosecuted for providing that care.”

Vance reverted the conversation back to the abortion law in Minnesota, summarizing a provision of the measure as stating, “A doctor who presides over an abortion where the baby survives, the doctor is under no obligation to provide life-saving care to a baby who survives a botched late-term abortion.” While Walz dismissed the contention as “not true,” Vance condemned the statute in question as “fundamentally barbaric.”

“That is not the way the law is written,” Walz said, accusing Vance of trying to “distort” the measure. “That’s been misread and it was fact-checked at the last debate.”