(LifeSiteNews) — For an hour on Wednesday, Vice President J.D. Vance took questions from students at the University of Mississippi at a Turning Point USA event, taking the place of his murdered friend Charlie Kirk. He answered questions about Christianity, his personal faith, and abortion—and referred to abortion as “child sacrifice” that leads to the mistreatment of women.

“I make no apologies for believing that Christianity is a pathway to God,” Vance told one student who was concerned about prayer in public schools. “I make no apologies for thinking that Christian values are an important foundation of this country, but I’m not going to force you to believe in anything, because that’s not what God wants, and that’s not what I want.”

The question on abortion came from a young woman serving as president of Ole Miss Rebels for Life, the campus pro-life group; the name triggered a heartwarming cheer from the gathered crowd and a smile from the vice president.

🚨A student confronts @JDVance tonight about abortion, stating he has wavered on the issue.

He disagrees and says he has not, stating that the “president has been the most prolife president.”

Directly after, he says that we must consider “edge cases,” like rape & incest, and… pic.twitter.com/DhlLACECC3

— Lizzie Marbach (@LizzieMarbach) October 30, 2025

“In the past, you have stated that you are 100% pro-life,” she said. “But since joining the presidential campaign as the VP you’ve kind of wavered how you see abortion, so I’m just wondering what your stance is right now, and do you think that someone else’s right to ‘liberty’ trumps someone else’s right to life?”

It took guts for the young pro-life leader to ask the vice president of the United States a question like that, and Vance began by telling her that “I appreciate the work that you do.”

“You asked the question: Do I think that someone else’s liberty trumps somebody else’s right to life?” Vance replied. “No, I do not. I do not in fact believe that. Now, I’m going to take issue with something you said—just the premise of the question, which is that I have wavered on the pro-life issue. I really do believe that the president has been the most pro-life president in the history of the United States of America.”

The slogan references the fact that during his first administration, Donald Trump selected the Supreme Court justices that ultimately resulted in the overturn of Roe v. Wade, as well as implementing other pro-life policies. During the 2024 presidential campaign, however, Trump pivoted to emphasizing that abortion is now an issue for the states and personally worked to remove the pro-life plank from the GOP platform for the first time in decades.

“There are two things we have to keep in mind here,” Vance continued. “One is the very hard question of when we talk about our abortion policy, there is some very, very difficult edge cases. There are cases where you have an 11-year-old girl who was raped where it would be unsafe for her to bring the pregnancy to term. You have situations where bringing the pregnancy to term would cause serious bodily harm; maybe death for the mother.”

READ: Trump admin rejoins pro-life Geneva Consensus to support international right to life

“It’s one of the reasons why we [the Trump administration] believe in the exception in these cases—again, they’re edge cases, they’re rare, the pro-abortion community would have you believe that they are 90% of abortions and that’s not true—but we’ve got to be honest about the fact that there are some edge cases.”

“The second thing I’d say about this is that we have to be prudential and practical in what can get accomplished,” Vance went on. “There may be disagreements about what exactly that is, but if you look at the pro-life victories that the president of the United States has been able to achieve, he’s been able to achieve them because he has worked within the system that we have.”

Vance went on to say that pursing “the most aggressive pro-life option” even if it means losing every election to the Democrats, who will implement abortion on demand up until the moment of birth, is a recipe for disaster.

“Somebody asked me earlier about my Christian values,” Vance said. “One of the points I made is that when the settlers came to the New World, they found very widespread child sacrifice. I imagine there are some people who don’t agree with my view on the pro-life issue. Let me just make an observation. If you go to historical archaeological sites where there were brothels—and the two oldest professions in the world are gambling and prostitution, so there were brothels even in very ancient civilizations.”

If you go back to ancient brothels, and you dig up the bones of the women who were working in these places, you will very often find a lot of children who were buried with them.… Whenever a society decides to discard innocent babies, they also don’t treat their women very well. And whenever a society mistreats its women, it is very often the babies who come right after that. There is a reason why Christian civilization ended the practice of child sacrifice all over the world, and it is one of the great accomplishments of Christian civilization.

“I believe that we should be trying to protect every unborn life,” Vance concluded. “There is a question about how exactly we do it, but I would never say that anyone’s right to life should be sacrificed.”

It is very impressive that a sitting vice president would take unvetted questions from university students for an hour and answer them at such length and with such candidness. It is also impressive that Vance—despite his political pragmatism and reference to “edge cases” that the pro-life movement has, in fact, addressed prodigiously—was willing to call abortion “child sacrifice” and refer to the abolition of child-killing as one of Christian civilization’s greatest accomplishments. Vance obviously has presidential aspirations, and thus his clear statement that “we should be trying to protect every unborn life” is very encouraging.