JD Vance, the Republican contender for vice president, defended his remark on Friday regarding “childless cat ladies” in the face of criticism following the recirculation of his 2021 remarks this week.
“Obviously, it was a sarcastic comment,” he said in an interview on “The Megyn Kelly Show” on SiriusXM. “I’ve got nothing against cats. I’ve got nothing against dogs. … People are focusing so much on the sarcasm and not on the substance of what I actually said. The substance of what I said, Megyn — I’m sorry, it’s true.”
“These people want to conflate the personal situation here with the fact that I’m making an argument that our entire society has become skeptical and even hateful towards the idea of having kids,” he said later.
During an appearance on Fox News in 2021, Vance, who was running for his Ohio Senate seat, said the U.S. was being run 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.”
He continued, “It’s just a basic fact — you look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC — the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children. And how does it make any sense that we’ve turned our country over to people who don’t really have a direct stake in it?”
In a 2021 address at the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, Vance voiced similar criticisms of Democrats, saying that his statements did not apply to people who were unable to procreate due to biological or medical limitations. On Friday, Vance restated, saying, “It’s not a criticism of people who don’t have children.”
“This is about criticising the Democratic Party for becoming anti-family and anti-child,” he stated. He claimed that the comment was the result of a discussion he had with his wife Usha regarding the pressure she was under not to have children due to potential professional setbacks. Two of their three children had been born at the time.
“What a weird society that we set up where moms who want to work, the thought that a lot of them are having is, ‘I can’t have more babies because it’s going to be bad for my career,'” he said, later adding that “having kids is good” because “being a parent changes your perspective on the world.”
Actress Jennifer Aniston, who has been vocal about her infertility issues, was one of the people who took issue with Vance’s prior comments and his stances on reproductive rights. Voting opposing a Democratic bill in June that aimed to preserve and increase access to IVF and other reproductive procedures, Vance signed a statement with his Republican colleagues stating that they “strongly support continued nationwide access to IVF.”
Aniston wrote on social media earlier this week, “Mr. Vance, I pray that your daughter is fortunate enough to bear children of her own one day. I hope she will not need to turn to IVF as a second option. Because you are trying to take that away from her, too.”
Vance claimed that because his daughter is just two years old, remarks like those are “disgusting”. “If she had fertility problems,” he stated, “I would try everything I could to try to help her because I believe families and babies are a good thing.”