Abrams: Vance has ‘no sympathy for how women experience life in America’

Former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams (D) said late Thursday that Sen. JD Vance (Ohio), the Republican vice presidential nominee, has “no sympathy for how women experience life in America.”

“JD Vance has shown again and again he has almost no sympathy for how women experience life in America, and he has demonstrated again and again that he reduces women to the least and most puerile notion of our humanity, and I would encourage everyone to discard and disregard what he says,” Abrams told MSNBC’s Alex Wagner on her show.

Abrams also went after Vance for remarks he made in 2021 when he said he was frustrated at what “Stacey Abrams said about a Georgia … abortion restriction a couple of years ago that this was a bad bill because it was bad for business.”

“When the big corporations come against you for passing abortion restrictions, when corporations are so desperate for cheap labor that they don’t want people to parent children, she’s right to say that abortion restrictions are bad for business,” Vance said at the time.

In response, Abrams said late Thursday that what she meant “is that women should have the right to control their bodies, because it determines how they secure an education, how they make a living, how they decide to grow families, and that companies are going to make terrible choices if they support restricting those rights.”

Vance has been facing criticism for comments he made three years ago in which he said the U.S. is being run by “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.”

Vance said last month that the “cat ladies” remarks were “sarcastic.”

“I know the media wants to attack me and wants me to back down on this, Megyn, but the simple point that I made is that having children, becoming a father, becoming a mother, I really do think it changes your perspective in a pretty profound way,” Vance said on SiriusXM’s “The Megyn Kelly Show.”

Abrams on MSNBC also discussed Vice President Harris’s campaign in Georgia, stating that the vice president “understands how critical Georgia is.”

“She understands that a battleground state does not mean there’s an automatic win or loss, it means you’ve gotta fight,” Abrams said. “And she believes that this is the fight worth fighting.”

Harris is currently trailing former President Trump by 2.1 points in the Peach State, according to an average of Georgia polls from The Hill/Decision Desk HQ. The average found her at 45.9 percent support to the former president’s 48 percent support. 

The Hill has reached out to a spokesperson for Vance for comment on Abrams’s latest remarks.