JD Vance speaks to supporters during a campaign event at the Northwestern Michigan Fair grounds.Scott Olson/Getty

One in every ten pregnancies in the US ends in a miscarriage, a common medical event for which there are safe and effective treatments should there be complications. But over the past two years, having a miscarriage in many states has become far more dangerous, thanks in part to the Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs decision overturning Roe v Wade.

Thirteen states have passed total abortion bans. Four others ban abortion after six weeks—a de facto ban. These laws have resulted in a rash of horror stories—not about the anticipated illegal backroom abortion deaths, but about ordinary women having ordinary but occasionally life-threatening pregnancy complications, while hospitals and doctors refuse to treat them for fear of being prosecuted.

Reporters and lawyers have chronicled stories of miscarrying women nearly dying from blood loss and infection, suffering debilitating injuries, and future infertility because of delayed care. One Texas hospital, the AP reported, even left a woman to miscarry in the ER restroom because the staff refused to treat her. Her husband had to call 911 from the ER for help.

Among the legion of GOP anti-abortion politicians in the US who’ve helped create this carnage, there is one you might expect to have some sympathy for the suffering of these women: Vice presidential candidate and Ohio Senator JD Vance. On the surface, the politician who denigrated Democrats as the party of “childless cat ladies” and suggested that “the whole purpose of the postmenopausal female, in theory,” was to take care of children, would not be an obvious softie for the victims of policies that have left women bleeding out in hospital restrooms. And yet, he might understand the situation better than many of his Republican colleagues.

Vance owes much of his fame and political career to his bestselling 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, a coming-of-age story about his triumph over family dysfunction, addiction, absent fathers, and cycles of abuse.

The memoir’s beating heart is Bonnie Blanton Vance, or “Mamaw,” the maternal grandmother Vance called his “guardian angel” in his July acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention. Blanton helped raise the future Yale Law School grad when his drug-addicted mother could not, saving him from becoming just another entry in a long family history of shiftless angry white men.

In Hillbilly Elegy, Vance holds Blanton up as the force of nature behind his successes. But the book also suggests she may be an unintended case study of something quite different: the importance of reproductive healthcare for........

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