J.D. Vance and the Politicization of Having Kids

What he and other pronatalists miss about the inherent gift of children.

After a couple weeks in which J. D. Vance’s comments about childless Americans have made the rounds, one wonders if Donald Trump is reconsidering his choice of running mate.

Photo by Dragos Gontariu on Unsplash

Last week, Kamala Harris’s campaign shared a 2021 Fox News interview in which then-Senate-candidate Vance lamented that the country 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?"

This week, Vance doubled down, smirking that he was being sarcastic and has “nothing against cats.” He told Megyn Kelly that Democrats are “anti-family” and “anti-child.” The Harris camp…