Ohio Senator JD Vance's grandmother suffered eight miscarriages and four pregnancies that came to term

JD Vance is a Republican vice presidential candidate and Ohio Senator and author of Hillbilly Elegy .

In his memoir, he says his maternal grandmother Bonnie Blanton Vance suffered eight miscarriages over ten years , plus four pregnancies that came to term.

Vance supports a national abortion ban, and he doesn't believe in exceptions for rape and incest.

In 2023 , Vance signed on to a letter to the secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services urging the agency to reverse a new rule that bars law enforcement officers from accessing patients' reproductive healthcare records.

Hillbilly Elegy: Mamaw Blanton's unplanned pregnancy at 13 was a singular catastrophic event that trapped her in a violent marriage for decades .

The pregnancy was also exceedingly dangerous, with Blanton ’s baby dying a week after she was born.

Experts say it is unlikely that a woman who’d had eight miscarriages, plus four pregnancies, the first at 13 , would not at some point have needed either a therapeutic abortion or the sort of miscarriage treatment.

Even before Roe v Wade , doctors didn't treat pregnant patients like this, says Mary Ziegler , a law professor at the University of California Davis .

Today , 10 states now have abortion bans with no exceptions for rape or incest.

Politicians like Vance "don’t see exceptions [to abortion bans] as being necessary to address tragedies," she says.