Vice President JD Vance is scheduled to address the March for Life rally in Washington D.C. on Friday.

Vance identifies as pro-life, though some pro-lifers have expressed disappointment by his compromises on the issue after President Donald Trump identified him as a potential running mate last year.

But Vance maintains he is pro-life, and he has repeatedly suggested that pro-lifers need to become more politically savvy if they are to save the lives of unborn babies, given that most voters in the country support allowing abortion in the majority of cases.

In July 2024 the Register described Vance’s Catholic journey. Today, the Register profiles Vance with respect to abortion, and with some background as to how he got there.

1. Who Is JD Vance?

James David Vance, 40, was born in 1984 in Middletown, Ohio into a dysfunctional extended family whose loves, loyalties and problems later became the stuff of his 2016 mega-selling memoir Hillbilly Elegy.

He spent much of his childhood living with his grandmother because his drug-addicted mother rarely provided a stable home. Violence, drunkenness, drug abuse and other self-destructive behavior ran through his extended family from rural Kentucky.

Vance exhibited some of those behavioral trends as a teenager. But a stint in the U.S. Marine Corps helped turn his life around. He came out of the service highly motivated, earned a bachelor’s degree from Ohio State in just one year and 11 months while working to support himself, and went on to become one of the few students from a state university to attend Yale Law School.

At Yale, he met his future wife, Usha, a Hindu whose parents are originally from India. They married in 2014. They have three small children and have a permanent home in Cincinnati.

The publication of Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis in June 2016 led to frequent television appearances and established him as a go-to source for reporters seeking to explain the social and political behavior of poor white people in Middle America. According to its publisher, the book has sold more than 3 million copies.

Vance worked for a law firm after graduating from Yale Law School. He later went into venture capital before deciding to run for the U.S. Senate from Ohio as a Republican in November 2022. He won, taking office in January 2023.

In July 2024, now-President Donald Trump selected Vance as his running mate in the November 2024 presidential election, and on Monday he was sworn in as the 50th vice president of the United States, shortly before Trump took the oath of office for his second (nonconsecutive) term.

2. What Religion Is Vance?

Vance is Catholic. He was baptized in August 2019 by a Dominican priest. He wrote a 7,000-word essay about his conversion for The Lamp in May 2021.

Vance grew up with little organized religion, though his grandmother was a believing Christian.

He wasn’t baptized and rarely went to church. When he did, it was mostly with his father, with whom he occasionally stayed as an adolescent. His father at that point attended a Pentecostal church, which Vance for a time identified with.

As a young man, Vance drifted into atheism. He became interested in Christianity again during a philosophy course in college. His long trek to Catholicism began in law school, through the influence of Catholic friends. Dominican priests guided his studies in the faith before he joined the Church.

Shortly after he became a Catholic in August 2019, Vance told an interviewer that the Church’s outlook on public affairs helped draw him in.

“My views on public policy and what the optimal state should look like are pretty aligned with Catholic social teaching,” Vance told Rod Dreher of The American Conservative.

3. What Is Vance’s History on Abortion?

It’s complicated.

Abortion never comes up in his book Hillbilly Elegy. He mentions teenage pregnancy several times — his mother, his grandmother and a cousin he’s close to (“one of my all-time favorite people”) all got pregnant as unmarried teens. But he never mentions the word “abortion” or refers to it.

As a first-time candidate for political office in the 2022 U.S. Senate campaign, Vance initially staked out an unusually expansive pro-life position.

In September 2021, he told an interviewer in Ohio that he supported a state law in Texas that bans abortion. “I think in Texas they’re trying to make it easier for unborn babies to be born,” he said.

The interviewer asked him about so-called hard cases — rape and incest. Vance said the real question in such cases is “whether a child should be allowed to live.”

“Look, I think two wrongs don’t make a right. At the end of the day, we’re talking about an unborn baby,” Vance said. “What kind of society do we want to have? A society that looks at unborn babies as inconveniences to be discarded?”

After a year of campaigning, Vance shifted his rhetoric. During two debates with his Democratic opponent in October 2022, Vance took more conventionally Republican positions.

During the first debate, under fire from his opponent for what he called Vance’s “extremism” on abortion, Vance said he had “always believed in reasonable exceptions,” including allowing a pregnant 10-year-old girl to have an abortion.

“I have said, repeatedly on the record, that I think that girl should be able to get an abortion if she and her family so choose to do so,” Vance said.

During the second debate that month, he said he supported a proposal in Congress at the time that would have banned abortion nationwide after 15 weeks, while allowing states to decide for themselves on whether to restrict it further or ban it.

In January 2023, Vance was one of 24 Republican U.S. senators who signed a letter asking the Biden administration’s attorney general, Merrick Garland, to enforce the federal Comstock Act of 1873, which bans sending items that cause abortion through the mail. The letter called on the administration to stop allowing abortion pills to be sent “by mail or common carrier.”

When the Trump campaign let it be known that Vance was on the shortlist to be Trump’s running mate in the summer of 2024, Vance aligned his public statements on abortion with Trump’s — including support for abortion pills.

Kristen Welker, host of NBC’s Meet the Press, asked Vance about the abortion pills misoprostol and mifepristone during an interview on July 7.

Vance replied:

On the question of the abortion pill, what so many of us have said is that: Look, the Supreme Court made a decision that the American people should have access to that medication. Donald Trump has supported that opinion. I support that opinion. I think it’s important to say that we actually have to have an important conversation in this country about what our abortion policy should be.

Welker later asked Vance about mifepristone, one of the two abortion pills. Here’s the exchange:

Welker: But just to be clear: You support mifepristone being accessible?

Vance: Yes, Kristen, I do.

4. The Pro-Abortion Vote In Ohio Altered Vance’s Outlook

An election result about a year after Vance won his race for the U.S. Senate affected Vance’s approach to abortion.

Ohio was considered a pro-life state after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022, triggering a six-week abortion ban the state had enacted into law in April 2019.

But in November 2023, voters in Ohio by 57% to 43% approved an amendment to the state constitution, making abortion a right.

In the aftermath, Vance called the Ohio vote “a gut punch,” and said pro-lifers need to understand why so many people don’t want to ban abortion even if most don’t like abortion.

“Having an unplanned pregnancy is scary. Best case, you’re looking at social scorn and thousands of dollars of unexpected medical bills. We need people to see us as the pro-life party, not just the anti-abortion party,” Vance wrote on social media.

Changing people’s minds, he wrote on Twitter, will require “sustained, years-long efforts to show the heart of the pro-life movement.”

He said pro-lifers need to become more politically savvy and accept compromises.

“I am as pro-life as anyone, and I want to save as many babies as possible. This is not about moral legitimacy but political reality,” Vance said.

He ended on a pro-life note.

“There is something sociopathic about a political movement that tells young women (and men) that it is liberating to murder their own children,” Vance said. “So let’s keep fighting for our country’s children, and let’s find a way to win.”