‘Childless cat ladies’: Has JD Vance taken on 22 million US women?

US Republican Vice Presidential candidate JD Vance has faced a storm of criticism over a three-year-old comment that has resurfaced amid the country’s election campaign, in which he suggests that because many in the next generation of Democratic Party leaders do not have children, they also do not have a stake in the future of the United States.

Vance’s comment has angered not just Democratic Party leaders but also many public figures and some Republican commentators, sparking questions over whether his public statements might be hurting former President Donald Trump’s re-election campaign. Trump had chosen Vance as his running mate ahead of the Republican National Convention in July.

At the heart of the debate are a record number of American women who are choosing to stay childless: 21.9 million women in the US between the ages 20 and 39 had not given birth in 2022, reaching a historic low, according to the US Census Bureau.

So, has Vance landed the Republican ticket in a soup?

Vance made the comment in a 2021 interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson. In the clip, Vance lamented how emerging leaders of the Democratic Party do not have children, maintaining an unswerving gaze and matter-of-fact tone over his videolink.

The US, Vance said, 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 dropped names: “It’s just a basic fact – you look at [Vice President] Kamala Harris, [Secretary of Transportation] Pete Buttigieg, [Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez] AOC – the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children.”

“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?”

Vance’s comment “offends on so many levels,” Debbie Walsh, the director of the Center for American Women and Politics (CAWP), told Al Jazeera. CAWP, which carries out research about women’s participation in US politics, is a unit of the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University.

Celebrities including actor Jennifer Aniston and singer Taylor Swift also criticised Vance.

After the comments resurfaced, Vance justified his earlier statement on Friday during an interview with talk-show host Megyn Kelly, saying he did not mean to attack people who cannot have children but was criticising the Democrats for becoming “anti-family”. However, he did double down, saying that “the substance of what I said, Megyn, I’m sorry, it is true”.

Why is the US increasingly becoming childless?

Economic factors have played a significant role in the declining rates of childbirth in the US. When the economy fell during the Great Recession in 2008 and 2009, the number of births fell too.

In recent years, other factors have come into play. Birth rates fell sharply during COVID-19. Research by the University of New Hampshire suggests that the growing expenses involved in raising children, limited access to childcare and family leave and lower marriage rates are among the drivers of declining birth rates.

Between April and May this year, the Pew Research Center surveyed more than 2,000 adults aged 50 and over who have never had children, alongside 770 adults aged 18 to 49 who do not have children and are unlikely to have them.

According to the survey reports, the share of US adults under 50 who do not have children and are unlikely to ever have children rose by 10 percentage points from 37 percent in 2018 to 47 percent in 2023.

The majority of the people surveyed said not having children made it easier for them to afford things they wanted, save money for the future and have time to spend on hobbies.

Other reasons for people not having children included a desire to focus on their careers and concerns about the state of the world, including the environment. Twenty percent of respondents under 50 said they just did not like children.

A considerable share of people over the age of 50 said they just did not find the right partner. A large share of this group also said there was a point in time when they had wanted children.

“A large group of men or women did have that in their plan, it just didn’t work out,” said Ayo Wahlberg, a professor in the anthropology department at the University of Copenhagen, referencing research carried out by anthropologist Marcia Inhorn, who surveyed 200 women in the US who froze their eggs.

Inhorn found that some of these women were in several relationships that did not work out. Wahlberg explained that this was because of the “mating gap”, where more women are going into higher education than men and are simply unable to find the right partner to have children with. He added that “dating apps are changing how dating takes place. People are having trouble finding their partner”.

He questioned: “As a politician, why would you only blame women in this equation – if you’d like people to get married and have children?”

Several early US presidents – all men, of course –  have not had biological children and had step-children or adopted children instead. These include George Washington, James Buchanan, who adopted his orphaned niece, and Andrew Jackson, who also adopted. James Madison and James Polk had no children at all.

Who does Vance’s statement offend?

Potentially, a long list of people, Walsh said.

“It offends people like Kamala Harris, who is a step-parent,” she said. Harris, the likely Democratic candidate to take on Trump in the election,  became a stepmother of two, Ella, now 25, and Cole, now 30, when she married their father Doug Emhoff in 2014.

“It offends women who made a conscious choice for whatever reason not to have children,” Walsh continued, adding that it also hurts women who have had medical complications with conceiving children and require in vitro fertilisation (IVF). Six months ago, the conservative-leaning Supreme Court of Alabama threatened to make the assisted reproductive method inaccessible after ruling that embryos are children.

“It offends people who have adopted,” she added. Transportation Secretary Buttigieg and his husband, Chasten Buttigieg, adopted twins in August 2021, the same year that Vance made his comment.

In an interview with CNN on July 24, Buttigieg opened up about how Vance’s 2021 comments came after Buttigieg and his husband had faced a “heartbreaking setback” in their adoption journey. “He [Vance] couldn’t have known that, but maybe that’s why you shouldn’t be talking about other people’s children”.

What does this mean for the US election?

Vance’s statements are likely not going to impact the women who are die-hard Trump supporters, Walsh said. But they might make it harder for Republicans to pull new female voters. However, it “does not seem like” they are trying to appeal to women who do not typically vote Republican, she said.

Walsh said that Vance implying that it “is the responsibility of women to procreate and have children, is not the kind of thing that you can say if you were trying to pull more women to support you”.

However, she added that Vance’s comment is one of many made by the Republicans that fit a pattern. Trump has built his campaign in this election around toughness and masculinity. Walsh pointed out that Trump entered the Republican National Convention to James Brown’s It’s A Man’s World playing in the background.

“At the time, he was running against Joe Biden, so the implication was that he was tougher than Biden, [who was portrayed as] weak and infirm. It’s taken on a whole new meaning now that he’s [likely to be] running against a woman,” Walsh said.

What’s next?

Walsh predicts that with Harris on the Democratic Party ticket, Republicans will look to replicate campaign strategies from the 2016 election where Trump ran against Hilary Clinton. She expects Harris’s campaign to take notes from the Clinton campaign and do things a bit differently – confronting Trump more than Clinton did.

The issue of declining birthrates is going to continue to become politicised, Wahlberg said.

“Country after country, governments have gone actively pro-natalist. They are appealing to their citizens to contribute to the future by childbearing,” he said.

But also, Wahlberg added, many are actively choosing not to have children due to fears of a future marred by climate change. “As a minimum, we should listen to those concerns about climate change and make sure we live on a liveable planet”.