In an interview with NBC5’s Stewart Ledbetter in June, Gerald Malloy, then a candidate in the Republican primary for a U.S. Senate seat in Vermont, was asked if he would vote to outlaw abortion in all 50 states — without exceptions, including for the life of the mother.
Malloy, who describes himself as “pro-life,” replied that he was glad that Roe v. Wade had been overturned. The landmark Supreme Court case had established the federal right to an abortion, but such decisions, he argued, belong to the states.
“To me,” Malloy said, “that’s democracy.” He added that he planned to vote against Article 22, which will appear on the November ballot and would enshrine reproductive rights in Vermont’s constitution.
But Ledbetter pressed him again. “As a senator,” he asked, would Malloy “vote to outlaw abortion, in all cases, for the country?”
“I would. I would,” Malloy replied, before adding that he thought such a proposal was unlikely to come up for a vote.
Having bested his Republican opponents in the August primary, Malloy was asked again about the possibility a nationwide abortion ban at a VTDigger debate last week.
“It would never come back up, in my opinion. It’s a state issue,” he said.
Pressed again about whether he would vote “no” on such a measure, Malloy was noncommittal.
“I’d have to look at it,” he replied.
On Tuesday, U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., introduced a bill that would ban abortions nationwide after 15 weeks of pregnancy. There is no chance the measure would be taken up in the Democrat-controlled chamber, and the bill has split Republicans, including in leadership, many of whom see the issue as an electoral liability ahead of the midterms. U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., the chamber’s minority leader, previously said a nationwide abortion ban is unlikely to come up if the GOP takes back control of the chamber, but he has not ruled it out.
“If we take back the House and the Senate, I can assure you we’ll have a vote on our bill,” Graham told the New York Times. “If the Democrats are in charge, I don’t know if we’ll ever have a vote on our bill.”
Republican candidates for Congress who cleared the primaries find themselves in a general election race in which Democrats are eager to make abortion a top issue. And several GOP nominees, in races across the country, are backpedaling or downplaying their views on reproductive rights.
The 19th, a national news outlet that focuses on gender, recently reported on Republican candidates in Arizona, Michigan and North Carolina who had erased anti-abortion pledges from their websites.
A video titled “I’m Proudly Pro-Life” appeared on the issues page of Malloy’s campaign website as recently as Aug. 17, according to an internet archive, but it has since been removed. (The video is still visible on Malloy’s YouTube account.)
His anti-abortion views remain on other areas of his site, which still includes the video of his interview with NBC5, as well as the line that he is “pro-life,” and that “Per the 10th Amendment I support taking this decision out of the Supreme Court and giving it to States and People.”
A representative from Malloy’s campaign said the candidate was not available for a phone interview Tuesday and provided a written statement that said, “per the US Constitution as a US Senator, I will vote to keep abortion issues decided at the state level.”
They did not respond to a follow-up email about whether this meant Malloy would vote against measures to ban abortions nationwide.