Tim Walz criticized the Texas abortion ban and blamed JD Vance and his running mate, former President Donald Trump, for it during the vice presidential debate on Tuesday.
While JD Vance tried to downplay the impact of state-level abortion bans during Tuesday’s vice presidential debate, Tim Walz pointed to Texas’ abortion ban and how Amanda Zurawski and other women have suffered under it.
When the vice presidential debate on Tuesday turned to abortion, the focus was on Texas and rhetoric from a Republican ticket that doesn’t match the harsh reality that women face in the state.
When the US Supreme Court swatted down Roe v. Wade in 2022, one of the toughest abortion bans in the country became law in Texas. The ban has prompted some women to travel out of state for abortions, or for women like Amanda Zurawski, to try and navigate the narrow exceptions in the state’s abortion ban while facing dire medical consequences.
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, the Democratic vice presidential candidate, pointed to the Texas ban on Tuesday and held former President Donald Trump responsible for making reproductive rights “determined on geography.”
“Donald Trump put this all into motion,” Walz said. “He brags about how great it was that he put the judges in and overturned Roe v. Wade. Fifty-two years of personal autonomy. And then he tells us, oh, we sent it to the states — it’s a beautiful thing.”
Walz then turned to the story of Zurawski, an Austin woman who has said she was forced to wait until she was diagnosed with a life-threatening case of sepsis before she could receive an abortion. She suffered serious injuries that affected her ability to have more children. In 2023, Zurawski was the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit with 19 other women with complicated pregnancies that tried — and failed — to overturn Texas’ abortion ban.
Walz criticized Trump for taking credit for overturning Roe.
“Amanda Zurawski would disagree with you on it’s a beautiful thing. A young bride in Texas waiting for their child. At 18 weeks, she has a complication, a tear in the membrane. She needs to go in. The medical care at that point needs to be decided by the doctor and that would have been an abortion. But in Texas that would have put them in legal jeopardy. She went home, got sepsis, nearly dies, and now she may have difficulty having children,” Walz said.
Under Texas law, doctors who treat women with complicated pregnancies face the potential of criminal and civil penalties. Abortions are banned except to save the life of pregnant patients. Since the state’s abortion ban went into effect in 2022, some medical providers are reluctant to pursue abortions and women face the medically dangerous choice of remaining in Texas or traveling to another state for an abortion.
Vance, like Trump in his September debate with Vice President Kamala Harris, lied about the reality of abortion in Texas.
“Donald Trump has been very clear that on the abortion policy specifically, that we have a big country, and it is diverse,” Vance said during the debate on Tuesday. “California has a different viewpoint on this than Georgia. Georgia has a different viewpoint from Arizona, and the proper way to handle this, as messy as democracy sometimes is, is to let voters make these decisions, let the individual states make their abortion policy.”
“I think that’s what makes the most sense in a very big, a very diverse, and sometimes a very, very messy and divided country,” Vance added.
Despite what Trump and Vance have claimed, voters won’t get a direct say on abortion policy in Texas. The state doesn’t allow citizen-led initiatives to put constitutional amendments on the ballot and the legislature is controlled by Republicans that passed the trigger-law that put the near-total ban in place.
During the debate, Walz also described abortion access as a human right.
“The catch all on this is the states will decide, what is right for Texas might not be right for Washington — that’s not how this works. This is basic human rights,” Walz said. “We have seen maternal mortality skyrocket in Texas, outpacing many other countries in the world. This is about health care. In Minnesota, we are ranked first in health care for a reason: We trust women, we trust doctors.”
In Texas, meanwhile, the number of women who died in the state while pregnant, during labor, or after childbirth skyrocketed since the state put in place its near-total abortion ban, according to an NBC News report. The rise in the maternal mortality rate in Texas outpaced a rise seen across the country, according to federal public health data that the media outlet reviewed.
Polls show that 52% of Texas voters say the state’s abortion laws should be made less strict, according to The Texas Politics Project.
