Elizabeth Warren says “American women are not stupid” and so she won't believe J.D. Vance's promise to veto any nationwide abortion ban passed by Congress if Republican candidate Donald Trump wins the November election.
“American women are not stupid, and we will not leave the future of our daughters and granddaughters in the hands of two men who have openly bragged about blocking access to abortion for women across the country,” Warren said Sunday on NBC’s Meet the Press.
The Democratic U.S. senator from Massachusetts said she suspected conservative activists could use the Comstock Act, a 19th-century anti-obscenity law that bans the mailing of abortion-related materials, to enforce a federal ban on abortion if the former president were to run for a second term with Vance as his running mate. “It wouldn’t be that hard to do that with the right person,” she said. [in] The Justice Department and one of their most extreme judges in the world has been charged.
“Get to understand this: 30% of all women today live in states that effectively ban abortion,” Warren said, referring to how 14 U.S. states have enacted near-total bans on the abortion procedure since the 2022 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that ended federal abortion rights. “With Donald Trump and J.D. Vance in the White House — it won't be 30%. It'll be 100%.”
Warren's comments came in response to a Meet the Press interview with Vance, in which he was asked whether Trump, if re-elected to the Oval Office, would use presidential veto powers to override Congress' federal abortion ban.
“They said … unequivocally that they would do it,” Vance told Meet the Press host Kristen Welker in a pre-recorded clip that the show began promoting Saturday. “They said … unequivocally that they would do it.”
Trump himself promised in April that he would not sign a national ban on abortion into law, despite polls showing that a clear majority of Americans favor legalizing abortion in all or most cases. But Democrats say he's lying.
He pointed out that Trump has spoken proudly about his three Supreme Court appointees, who were part of the conservative majority that gutted federal abortion rights established by the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973.
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And he also pointed to how the 900-page Project 2025 plan, drafted by a conservative thinktank that supports Trump, calls on the Food and Drug Administration to completely revoke its approval of the abortion drug mifepristone.
Project 2025 also discusses using the Comstock Act to criminally prosecute those who send abortion pills or devices through the mail. In 2023, Vance joined 40 fellow Republican lawmakers in calling on U.S. Justice Department prosecutors to investigate physicians, pharmacists and others who “violate federal mail-order abortion laws”.
In June, Warren — a 2020 Democratic presidential primary candidate — helped introduce legislation aimed at repealing the Comstock Act. It has not secured the 60 votes needed to advance bills in the Senate. But part of the strategy for the proposed bill was to raise awareness about the consequences of the Comstock Act for the 168 million women living in the US — a country with a population of 333 million.
According to Warren, the only way to protect access to abortion in the U.S. is to elect Democratic candidate Kamala Harris over Trump — as well as have a clear liberal majority in Congress that will pass laws ensuring the right to access abortion-related care across the country.
“She will sign it into law,” Warren said. “And then we will restore the rights of half the population of this country.”