A prominent Democrat has wished for Republican nominee Donald Trump’s running mate J.D. Vance to have to deal with a pregnancy resulting from rape.
Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear, a campaign surrogate for Vice President Kamala Harris, spoke with MSNBC on Tuesday and accused Vance, a senator from Ohio, of having no respect for women’s “reproductive freedoms.”
“J.D. Vance calls pregnancy resulting from rape ‘inconvenient’. Inconvenience is traffic!” Beshear told Morning Joe’s Mika Brzezinski. “Make him go through this!”
Vance soon got wind of Beshear’s remarks, calling the Democrat a “disgusting person.”
“What the hell is this? Why is [Andy Beshear] wishing that a member of my family would get raped?!?” he said on X (formerly Twitter).
The Trump-Vance campaign followed up by denouncing Beshear’s comments as “vile.”
“After speaking on the DNC main stage last night, Harris campaign surrogate Governor Andy Beshear went on national television this morning and explicitly called for a member of Senator Vance’s family to be raped,” Vance’s spokesman William Martin said in a statement. “His comments are disgusting, vile, and should not be tolerated in American politics.”
The campaign called on Harris to “immediately repudiate Governor Beshear’s comments and demonstrate that regardless of partisan disagreements, this kind of violent rhetoric has no place in our public discourse.”
Beshear went back to MSNBC later in the day, dismissing Vance’s criticism as “deflection” and accusing the Ohio senator of lacking empathy.
“He’s trying to make himself the victim,” he told Andrea Mitchell. “As a man, J.D. Vance will never have to face any of this personally. But it’s sad that he lacks the empathy to be able to put himself in a different position,” he added.
Democrats have made abortion the centerpiece of their national convention in Chicago this week, accusing Trump and Vance of wanting to outlaw the procedure nationwide. Planned Parenthood has even parked a bus outside the convention center, advertising free abortions and vasectomies to anyone interested – and claiming to be fully booked all week.
Trump, who was president from 2017 to 2021 and is now seeking a second term, has said abortion should be a matter for individual US states to legalize or outlaw as they see fit. This was the position of the Supreme Court in 2022, when it overturned the 1973 precedent (Roe v. Wade) that had de facto legalized abortion, calling it part of the constitutionally protected right to privacy.
Beshear has been the governor of Kentucky since 2019, and is the son of a former governor. He was considered one of the leading candidates to be Harris’ running mate, but she chose Minnesota Governor Tim Walz instead. Harris herself got the nomination after the Democrats pressured incumbent President Joe Biden to drop out of the race last month.