Recordings show Va. swing district candidate favors ‘total ban’ on abortion

By Laura Vozzella
Updated August 10, 2023 at 6:28 p.m. EDT | Published August 10, 2023 at 3:45 p.m. EDT

RICHMOND — John Stirrup has been playing up crime, taxes and other bread-and-butter issues while running for the House of Delegates in a purple Northern Virginia district, but the Republican didn’t mince words when two strangers separately buttonholed him 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.”
Made surreptitiously by two abortion rights supporters posing as abortion foes, the recordings seem intended to pin Stirrup down on an issue that Republicans in some swing districts would like to sidestep but Democrats hope to make a rallying cry in Nov. 7 General Assembly elections.

With control of both chambers up for grabs, about a dozen highly competitive races, including this one in part of Prince William County, will end up determining whether Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) has the political muscle next year to roll back abortion rights in Virginia — the only Southern state that has not tightened restrictions on the procedure since the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade last year.

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By Laura Vozzella
Laura Vozzella covers Virginia politics for The Washington Post. Before joining The Post, she was a political columnist and food writer at the Baltimore Sun, and she has also worked for the Associated Press, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and the Hartford Courant. https://twitter.com/LVozzella