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In the 1960s and 70s, Jane Goodman recalls dealing with systemic misogyny. Women were not able to get credit cards in their own names until 1974, for example. Now 78, Goodman, a former actress and government worker, also remembers accompanying her roommate for an “illegal abortion in a hotel room” in New York City during her sophomore year at Connecticut College for Women, before the constitutional right to an abortion was established via Roe v. Wade in 1973. “That was a chilling nightmare,” she says.
What Goodman does not recall are any disparaging comments on her status as a childless woman, even though she remained so until she had a child at age 40, during a period when the average age of becoming a mother was 21. “Nobody thought that I was not fulfilling my destiny or duty to society because I was being productive,” she says. “I had gone to college. I was using my degree. I got jobs, I paid taxes.”
Today, decades later, similarly situated women have recently faced a deluge of judgment triggered by former president Donald Trump’s vice presidential pick, Ohio Sen. JD Vance. Unsurprisingly, Vance has repeatedly criticized liberals, but one particular and controversial target of his contempt are women—including presumed Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris—who do not have biological kids.
In a 2021 interview that has recently dominated headlines, Vance told conservative TV firebrand Tucker Carlson, “We’re effectively run in this country—via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs—by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.” (Vance specifically called out Vice President Harris, who has two step-children, and New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, as “people without children” in the Democratic party.)
Then, in a speech from 2021 that has also resurfaced, Vance suggested people with kids should have more voting power than people without. “Let’s give votes to all children in this country, but let’s give control over those votes to the parents of those children,” he said at an event hosted by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, a conservative group.
Vance isn’t the only person of influence criticizing childless women. Conservative writer John Mac Ghlionn recently penned a piece in Newsweek arguing that one of the most famous singers of all time, Taylor Swift, should not necessarily be considered a role model because “Swift remains unmarried and childless” at age 34, he wrote.
Barbara Collura, president of the national infertility support group Resolve, says women are accustomed to strangers expressing rude opinions about their maternal status. But what’s startling to her is that despite progress in policy and employment spaces regarding infertility and even paid leave for miscarriages, it is “disappointing” that there are now “national leaders just making a judgment about people who are childless.”
As voters of various political persuasions shift leftward in response to the GOP’s anti-abortion rhetoric, the focus on undermining people with no children has roused a new crowd of Harris campaign surrogates: the large, and growing, number of adults who, because of a deliberate choice not to have children or because of struggles with infertility, are without kids. (The proportion of adults under 50 unlikely to ever have kids rose 10 percent in the last five years, according to Pew Research Center.)
Harris—who is an involved stepmother to her husband Doug Emhoff’s two adult children from his first marriage—has not commented on Vance’s statements. But people without biological children across the political spectrum have resoundingly criticized the increasingly relentless pro-natalist perspective from the right, including from one of the party’s most prominent leaders.
“How dare you denigrate them and say they are not as valuable?”
“I have been trying to warn every conservative man I know—these JD comments are activating women across all sides, including my most conservative Trump supporting friends,” said Meghan McCain, the daughter of late Republican Arizona Sen. John McCain, and vocal critic of Trump.
Among Vance’s detractors is the Hollywood superstar Jennifer Aniston, who has generally distanced herself from the political fray: “I truly can’t believe this is coming from a potential VP of the United States,” she wrote on social media. Former Trump Administration official Alyssa Farah Griffin (who denounced the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and, like Aniston, does not have children) also excoriated Vance. “How dare you denigrate them and say they are not as valuable?” Griffin said on the daytime television talk show The View.
Joining the chorus are everyday Americans who have battled infertility or chosen not to have children for a wide variety of personal reasons. “To follow my dreams, to not devote my time to taking carloads of kids to sports—I just knew my time had to be free,” said Nancy Strachan, 75, of Virginia. “I never regretted it.”
Sans children, Strachan has been able to fight world hunger and climate change in underdeveloped countries. She now says she is more motivated than ever to devote her free time to electing a Democrat to the White House, perhaps by volunteering for phone banks and donating money. “For him to judge women who were childless, it triggered something really, really deep in me,” she said.
Adult men without children, who are less often on the receiving end of probing questions about procreation plans, are also incensed. Bob Cranston, a self-described “childless cat dad” from Las Vegas, explains that he and his his ex-wife unsuccessfully attempted to start a family. “We had friends who did the $50,000 thing, and we just said, ‘Look, we’re not going to do that,'” he explained. “First, I just don’t have that kind of money to throw around. And secondly, we were not that desperate. If it happens, great. If it doesn’t, that’s life.” In the end, he says, “It just didn’t work out. I don’t think anybody should hold that against anybody.”
Approximately one in six US couples struggles with infertility, and they too have been outraged by Vance’s remarks—which have even more sting as an increasing faction of his party’s most extreme anti-abortion flank has attempted to make IVF more difficult by regulating the disposal of embryos, which often happens throughout the infertility treatment process.
“To make some judgment about a person without kids, and secondly, to then say that their worth to society is somehow less—I think that really hit our community incredibly hard,” said Resolve’s Collura. “Don’t mess with the infertility family-building community, because this is a community that’s not going to take kindly to people who are going to attack us, or somehow say that we’re less engaged in civil society because of what our family looks like.”
Vance’s comments about Harris not having kids was also perceived as the erasure of stepparents, who work hard to build meaningful, parental relationships with their spouses’ children. Rachelle Katz, family and marriage therapist and author of the book The Happy Stepmother, argues that talking about Harris as childless is “a modern way of stigmatizing stepmothers as wicked and evil—just updating the stereotype a little.”
“It makes me hopeful about Kamala. She’s worked hard as a step mother. She is used to hard work.”
A step-mother herself, Katz describes the process as “far and away, the hardest role in society.” She continues: “It makes me hopeful about Kamala. She’s worked hard as a step mother. She is used to hard work.”
In a combative interview at an event hosted by Black journalists on Wednesday, Trump defended his selection of Vance, saying, “historically, vice presidents have very little impact in terms of the election—I mean, virtually no impact.”
Droves of people hurt by Vance’s comments about people without children would disagree.
Strachan, who joined a Facebook group called “Cat Ladies for Kamala Harris” (48,300 members and counting) has one thing to say: “Wait for November 5.”
