It is said that vice presidential picks do not have a great deal of impact on the top of the ticket. This year could be an exception now that Vice President Kamala Harris chose Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota as her running mate, and former President Donald Trump named Senator JD Vance of Ohio as his. The differences between the V.P. candidates are stark, particularly when it comes to women’s rights. After the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade two years ago, Governor Walz signed a bill protecting abortion in his state. “We’re putting up a firewall to ensure Minnesotans have the freedom to make their own health care decisions,” Mr. Walz said at the time. Mr. Vance’s views put him in the farthest-out fringe of his party in this regard.
After the federal Department of Health and Human Services put a rule in place to safeguard reproductive health information, Mr. Vance was among a group of congressional members who wrote to the D.H.H.S. secretary stating their opposition. The measure shields health information of patients seeking lawful reproductive care from disclosure for the purpose of criminal, civil, or administrative investigations. In addition, he has spoken in favor of a national abortion ban and supports state laws promoting surveillance of contraception, menstrual records, if they exist, to restrict women’s movement to places where abortion is legal, and to criminalize receiving prescribed abortion drugs through the mail.
It was Mr. Trump, along with former Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, who put together the Supreme Court that set back women’s freedom by more than half a century. Its 2023 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson took away the previously settled constitutional right to privacy and bodily autonomy by giving states increased rights to limit and outlaw abortions and even outlaw travel between states to get an abortion. There remains a stark discriminatory aspect to all this — getting pregnant is a “life-changing experience that can result in incapacitation, lasting injury, economic hardship including the inability to work and care for other children, and sometimes death, especially in the absence of adequate medical care,” a leading writer on freedom issues put it.
Mr. Vance does not stop at reproductive rights; he has said that parents even in the most physically abusive relationships should remain married or partners for children’s sake — a myth. And he has called domestic violence shelters part of a “war on families.” It remains to be seen whether this will hurt the Trump-Vance ticket in the general election. But with women registering and voting at higher rates than men in every presidential election since 1980 and with the turnout gap between women and men growing larger with each successive presidential election, one would want to believe that its chances are significantly diminished by the vice-presidential selection.