‘Women aren’t stupid enough’ to believe Vance’s promise to veto US abortion ban, Warren says | US Elections 2024

Elizabeth Warren claims that “American women are not stupid” and therefore would not believe JD Vance’s promise that Donald Trump would veto any national abortion ban passed by Congress if the Republican presidential ticket won the November election.

“American women are not stupid, and we are not going to entrust the future of our daughters and granddaughters to two men who have openly bragged about blocking access to abortion for women across this country,” Warren said Sunday on NBC’s Meet the Press.

The Massachusetts Democratic senator added that she suspects conservative activists will use the Comstock Act, a 19th-century anti-obscenity law that prohibits the mailing of abortion-related materials, to enforce a federal abortion ban if the former president wins a second presidency with Vance as his running mate. She said that would not be so “hard to do” with “the right person in the Justice Department and one of their extremist judges in the world.”

“Understand this: Today, 30% of women live in states that effectively ban abortion,” Warren said, referring to the fact that 14 U.S. states have enacted near-total bans on the procedure since the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 decision that eliminated federal abortion rights. “Donald Trump and J.D. Vance in the White House — it’s not going to be 30%. It’s going to be 100%.”

Warren’s remarks came in response to a separate interview with Vance on Meet the Press in which he was asked whether Trump, if re-elected to the Oval Office, would use the presidency’s veto powers to overturn a federal abortion ban passed by Congress.

“I think he would,” Vance told Meet the Press host Kristen Welker in a pre-recorded clip that began being promoted Saturday. “He said … explicitly that he would.”

Last April, Donald Trump himself promised that he would not sign a bill banning abortion nationwide, even though polls showed that a clear majority of Americans supported legalizing abortion in all or most cases. But Democrats insist he is lying.

They point out that Trump has spoken proudly of his three Supreme Court appointments who were part of the conservative majority that dismantled the federal right to abortion previously established by the Roe v Wade decision in 1973.

And they note how the 900-page Project 2025 plan written by a conservative think tank that supports Trump calls on the Food and Drug Administration to completely revoke its approval of the abortion drug mifepristone.

The 2025 bill also envisions using the Comstock Act to criminally prosecute people who send abortion pills or tools through the mail. In 2023, Vance joined 40 of his Republican colleagues in calling on U.S. Justice Department prosecutors to investigate prosecutions of doctors, pharmacists and others “who violate federal mail-order abortion laws.”

In June, Warren, a Democratic candidate in the 2020 presidential primary, helped introduce a bill to repeal the Comstock Act. It fell short of the 60 votes needed to advance the bill in the Senate. But part of the strategy for the proposed bill was to raise awareness about the impact of the Comstock Act on the 168 million women living in the United States, a country of 333 million.

Warren said Sunday that the only way to protect access to abortion in the United States was to elect Democratic nominee Kamala Harris over Trump — and a Congress with a clear liberal majority that would pass laws enshrining the right to access abortion care nationwide.

“She will sign this bill,” Warren said. “And then we will restore a right to half the people of this country.”