From DPVA:
CAUGHT ON TAPE: Virginia MAGA Republicans Reveal Extreme Anti-Abortion Agendas
Leading GOP candidates have been caught promising to go further than 15-week abortion ban
Richmond, VA – Just one week ahead of the elections on November 7th, Virginia MAGA Republicans continue to get caught pushing for extreme abortion bans that are out-of-step with voters. If these extreme Republicans take total control, they’ll ban abortion, taking away the right and letting politics make that decision instead of women, doctors and nurses.
Virginia is the last state in the South where Republicans haven’t limited abortion; the election next week will determine the future of those rights for millions of women and Virginia’s GOP is on defense.
Recent Coverage Shows Virginia GOP Revealing Extreme Anti-Abortion Agendas:
NEW! Richmond Times-Dispatch: Senate hopeful Durant signals interest in going beyond 15 weeks on abortion
- “Del. Tara Durant, a Republican candidate in a Stafford-area Senate race, indicated in a surreptitiously made recording that she is interested in restricting abortion access further than the 15-week prohibition much of her party is campaigning on this year.”
- “‘It depends on what makes it to the floor of the Senate and the House — if it will pass. That is why we are fighting to get as much as we can,’ Durant told the person.”
Rolling Stone: Are These ‘Reasonable’ Republicans Privately Plotting an Abortion Crackdown?
- “Despite such public sentiment, Youngkin led an effort earlier this year to ban most abortions at 15 weeks gestation, a proposal that included decade-long prison sentences for doctors who violated it. The legislation didn’t make it out of committee in the state Senate, where Democrats currently hold a slim, four-seat majority.”
- “Other high profile Republicans now rallying around the 15-week ban have supported much more severe restrictions in the past. In an appearance on Newsmax when she was running for office in 2021, Winsome Sears — now lieutenant governor of Virginia — said that she would support bringing a Texas-style bounty law, banning abortion at six weeks, to the commonwealth.”
- “Todd Gilbert, now the speaker of the House of Delegates, once supported a bill that declared life begins at conception and that unborn children would have ‘all the rights, privileges, and immunities available to other persons’ under Virginia law.”
- “[…] a majority of those Republican candidates — many of them running in competitive districts in the two chambers of the Legislature — pushed as recently as this year for far stricter abortion bans than the one Youngkin has proposed […]”
- “The implication is that the legislators could ultimately push for a stricter policy on reproductive rights than the one Youngkin is promising Virginians if he helps Republicans win back control of the state Senate and keep control of the House of Delegates.”
Washington Post: On abortion, Gov. Youngkin says he’ll sign ‘any bill … to protect life’
- “Gov. Glenn Youngkin said […] he believes life begins at conception and vowed to sign ‘any bill … to protect life’ that reaches his desk, expressing more ambitious anti abortion goals than he set out last year on the campaign trail or expects to pull off in the next legislative session.”
- “‘Any bill that comes to my desk I will sign happily and gleefully in order to protect life,’ he said in an online forum organized by the Family Foundation of Virginia to celebrate the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, the landmark ruling that had legalized abortion nationwide.”
- “…He characterized his proposed 15-week ban as the fallback and indicated that he would push for stricter limits if Republicans hold onto the House of Delegates and flip the state Senate in elections next year.”
Washington Post: Recordings show Va. swing district candidate favors ‘total ban’ on abortion
- “‘I would support a 100 percent ban,’ Stirrup told a woman who had approached him after a Republican primary debate May 18, according to a recording obtained by The Washington Post. In another recording, made June 20, he told a man he met outside a polling place that ‘I’d like to see, you know, [a] total ban.’”
- “Stirrup’s comments on abortion resemble those made by Youngkin, a potential 2024 presidential candidate who has publicly backed a 15-week ban but has occasionally staked out more ambitious anti abortion goals in private.”
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