The ultra-conservatism on moral issues of the Republican candidate for vice president of the United States, JD Vance, goes so far as to request the withdrawal of the right to vote from “people who do not have children” and, by extension, to consider Kamala Harris, a candidate for the Democratic nomination for president, “incapable” of performing such a role because she has not reproduced. The misogynistic comment about Harris, taken from a 2021 interview but which the networks have resurrected and made viral after Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the presidential race, included as its main detail another stale cliché: that nulliparous women like her remedy their frustration by surrounding themselves with cats. The mobilization on the networks has been automatic, with funny and indignant campaigns in favor of “childless cat ladies” (women with cats and without children). From the actress Jennifer Aniston to grassroots women’s organizations, Democratic women have come out in force in support of the vice president and the controversy has reached prime time television.
Vance’s comments fit into his conservative worldview, which is completely opposed to abortion even in cases of incest or rape, but also to other reproductive health issues such as in vitro fertilization. Childless Americans, the Republican once declared, must “face the consequences and the reality” and not have “nearly an equal voice” in democracy, being, in his view, handicapped by the lack of offspring or temporal significance. “Let’s give votes to every child in this country, but let’s give control over those votes to the parents of those children. Does that mean that non-parents don’t have an equal voice with parents? Yes, that’s right, absolutely.”
Actress Jennifer Aniston, a well-known Democrat, has ardently criticised Vance for these old comments, which the Republican would probably have avoided now at the behest of his campaign: the huge mobilisation in support of Harris after Biden’s withdrawal has frightened Trump’s team, which in recent days has called for restraint in criticism of the candidate to avoid a boomerang effect, that is, that attacks on her person automatically become a flood of votes. But the immediacy of the networks has worked the miracle of resurrecting an old and forgotten clip to embarrass the new star of the Republican Party.
“Miserable” lives
In that interview, given to Tucker Carlson, the former star presenter of the conservative Fox network, Vance, a clean-shaven senator and best-selling author of his memoirs Billhilly, a rural elegyspoke disparagingly of that “group of childless ladies with cats and miserable lives.” “I really can’t believe these words came from a potential vice president of the United States,” Aniston wrote on the social network Instagram on Wednesday. “All I can say is… Mr. Vance, I pray that your daughter [el republicano tiene otros dos hijos varones] “May she be lucky enough to have children of her own someday. I hope she doesn’t have to resort to IVF as a second option,” Aniston wrote, “because you are trying to take that option away from her.”
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Last month, Ohio Senator Vance voted to block legislation proposed by Democrats to guarantee access to in vitro fertilization nationwide.
Harris is stepmother to two children from her husband Doug Emhoff’s first marriage. The two attended the Democratic inauguration in January 2021 and are close to the vice president. “How can you be ‘childless’ when you have such cute kids like Cole and me?” Ella Emhoff, 25, wrote on social media about her and her brother Cole, 29, and their familial relationship with their father’s wife.
In his conversation with Carlson on Fox, Vance lamented that the US was governed “by a bunch of ladies with cats and no children who are miserable with their own lives and the choices they’ve made, and so they want the rest of the country to be miserable too” (an argument often used by Donald Trump as well, but without the feline allusions). Vance also took aim at other prominent Democrats: “Look at Pete Buttigieg, AOC [siglas con las que se conoce a la progresista Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez]”The entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children,” Vance said. The New York representative has no children, but Transportation Secretary Buttigieg welcomed two children with her husband, born via surrogacy, shortly after the interview.
Following the Supreme Court’s repeal of constitutional protection of the federal right to abortion, the so-called doctrine Roe vs Wadein June 2022, the ban has become electoral ammunition of the first order, first in the November 2022 midterm elections — the voluntary interruption safeguard allowed the Democrats a better-than-expected result — and then in the 2024 presidential campaign. And of all the senior officials in the Democratic administration, no one has embodied that fight and, by extension, the staunch defense of the sexual and reproductive health rights of Americans like Kamala Harris.
Women’s reproductive rights are at the forefront of this presidential election, Harris is militant and very eloquent in their defense – it has been one of the driving forces of her vice presidency – and that could widen the gender gap in the electorate and benefit the Democrats. Women voters could be the barricade between Trump and that dictatorship that the Republican announced for the hypothetical first day of his mandate.
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