By now most everyone knows about J.D. Vance’s (Trump’s pick for vice president) 2021 “childless cat ladies” riff disparaging women who haven’t had children as being “miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the country miserable, too,” referencing Vice President Kamala Harris in particular.
Responding to the resoundingly raucous backlash to his comments, Vance has doubled down, defending his position that women who can have children should have children, a statement that oscillates with a very “Handmaid’s Tale” vibration.
Vance suggests we failed to decipher the deeper meaning of his insulting caterwauling, that being that Democrats are anti-children and anti-family (www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/jd-vance-doubles-childless-cat-ladies-dig-got-nothing-cats-rcna163857).
I would like to remind readers that it is the Republicans, like U.S. Rep. Jack Bergman from Michigan’s First U.S. Congressional District, who have consistently voted against funding to supply schoolchildren with free lunches and whose Project 2025 now recommends eliminating Head Start programs that give thousands of poor, preschool-age children a leg up before entering kindergarten. Who wants to see the Department of Education eliminated entirely? Sound anti-child, anti-family to you? It does to me. But I digress.
I would suggest that Vance’s intimation that childless women are “miserable” may be projecting his own depressed state of mind onto women who are increasingly opting out of child bearing. According to the Pew Research Center, “44% of non-parents between the ages of 18-49 say it is not too likely, or not at all likely that they will have children someday.” People in this category (men and women) give various reasons for deciding not to have children: They just don’t want any; they are concerned about the effect of climate change on future generations; they have medical reasons; or are concerned about the state of the world (www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2021/11/19/growing-share-of-childless-adults-in-u-s-dont-expect-to-ever-have-children/). Not only are young men and women choosing not to have children, but they are also increasingly deciding not to marry at all.
In the first ad put out by the Harris campaign, backgrounded by the music of Beyonce’s single “Freedom,” Vice President Kamala Harris announces she is running for president of the United States. Against the leering, distorted faces of Trump and Vance, she declares, “In this election, we each face a question: What kind of country do we want to live in? There are some people who think we should be a country of chaos, of fear, of hate. But us? We choose something different. We choose freedom.”
Yes, freedom. Freedom to decide whether to have children. Freedom to decide whether to marry, whom to love, what careers we choose, what religion we practice, if any. The freedom to pursue happiness and the freedom to vote.
To ensure that these freedoms prevail, we must all do everything we can between now and Nov. 5 to encourage our friends and family members to vote and make plans to do so ourselves. Freedom matters.
Women of America, let’s send Mr. Vance a message: We aren’t going back!