'Droves of' childless Americans and adoptive parents are still raging at JD Vance

02 August 2024

When "Hillbilly Elegy" author JD Vance repeatedly attacked "childless cat ladies" and "childless Democrats" in 2021 and 2022, he was met with some scathing criticism in liberal and progressive publications. But it wasn't a huge controversy.

But now that the Ohio senator is Donald Trump's presidential running mate and one of the Democrats he attacked — Vice President Kamala Harris — is the 2024 Democratic presidential nominee, Vance's comments have come back to haunt him in a big way.

The criticism has been coming from both the left and the right. Conservative GOP activist Meghan McCain, in a July 24 post on X, formerly Twitter, wrote, "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. These comments have caused real pain and are just innately unchristian. This is not who we are."

In an article published on August 2, Mother Jones' Abby Vesoulis lays out some reasons why the controversy hasn't died down and why "droves of" Americans are furious with Vance.

"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," Vesoulis explains. "The proportion of adults under 50 unlikely to ever have kids rose 10 percent in the last five years, according to Pew Research Center."

During those 2021 and 2022 interviews, two of the Democrats he attacked for being "childless" were Harris and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. But Harris has stepchildren via her husband Doug Emhoff, while Buttigieg and his husband have adopted two kids. And some of Vance's critics have been slamming him for denigrating the contributions of stepparents and adoptive parents.

Vesoulis observes, "Adult men without children, who are less often on the receiving end of probing questions about procreation plans, are also incensed…. Approximately one in six U.S. 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…. 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, author of the book "The Happy Stepmother," told Mother Jones that attacking Harris as childless is "a modern way of stigmatizing stepmothers as wicked and evil — just updating the stereotype a little."

Katz added, "It makes me hopeful about Kamala. She's worked hard as a step mother. She is used to hard work."

Read Abby Vesoulis' full report for Mother Jones at this link.

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