Usha Vance Says JD Vance’s ‘Childless Cat Ladies’ Comment Is Just a Silly Bit

I wonder if the Ohio senator’s call for childless people to lose voting rights was also just a bit???

By Kylie Cheung  |  August 5, 2024 | 4:15pm
Photo: Getty Images Politics JD Vance
Usha Vance Says JD Vance’s ‘Childless Cat Ladies’ Comment Is Just a Silly Bit

Since Donald Trump selected Ohio Sen. JD Vance as his running mate in July, every headline about Vance has either been about his bizarre, rumored sexual fetish or a resurfaced clip of him going off on a tirade about “sociopathic” childless people razing this once-great country to the ground. In Vance’s most famous permutation of these comments from 2021, he refers to Vice President Kamala Harris and other Democrats who don’t have biological children as “childless cat ladies” who “are miserable in their own lives”—which, like his comments implying childless adults should lose their right to vote, is sure to endear him to the 47% of U.S. adults younger than 50 without kids.

In a Fox News interview that aired on Monday, Vance’s wife, attorney Usha Vance, attempted to do damage control and insisted that the “childless cat ladies” remark was some sort of bit. Ma’am, you do realize that bits are supposed to be funny, right…?

“He made a quip in service of making a point that he wanted to make that was substantive,” Usha told Fox News host Ainsley Earhardt. “And I just wish sometimes that people would talk about those things and that we would spend a lot less time just sort of going through this three-word phrase or that three-word phrase, because what he was really saying is that it can be really hard to be a parent in this country.”


Sure, except just one small thing: That’s not what Vance said at all! He didn’t propose anything akin to universal child care or paid family leave or anything of the sort. Let’s review his original comments in full, shall we? 

“We’re effectively run in this country, via the Democrats… 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,” Vance rambled to Tucker Carlson in 2021. “If you look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, [Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY)], 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?” 

In more resurfaced comments, also from 2021, Vance says people who don’t have children are “sociopathic,” “psychotic,” and “deranged” and can’t be trusted with political leadership. And in another speech, also from that year, Vance argued that people who don’t have children should “face the consequences and the reality” and not be accorded “nearly the same voice” in democracy. He even suggested they shouldn’t be able to vote, while parents should be able to vote twice: “Let’s give votes to all children in this country, but let’s give control over those votes to the parents of those children.” 

While Vance is clearly attacking childless adults broadly, his comments are also distinctly gendered. The right’s decades-long policy war on abortion rights is meant to compel childbirth, all while the right has simultaneously waged a cultural war on women who aren’t mothers for supposedly failing at their one, existential purpose. 

Given the opportunity to clarify his 2021 cat lady remarks just a couple of weeks ago, Vance only doubled down, apologizing not to women without kids but to cats: “I’ve got nothing against cats. I’ve got nothing against dogs. … People are focusing so much on the sarcasm and not the substance of what I actually said,” he said on Megyn Kelly’s podcast. If Vance cares about making working parents’ lives easier and not just demonizing “childless cat ladies,” it’s not hard to articulate this.

But the thing is, that’s clearly not Vance’s position. Just as he’s relentlessly railed against childless people, he’s among Senate Republicans who have rejected federal protections for IVF. Consequently, Vance came under fire for this from none other than Jennifer Aniston, who pointed out the distinct cruelty of Vance’s comments, seemingly referencing her personal struggles with fertility in a social media post in July. “All I can say is…Mr. Vance, I pray that your daughter is fortunate enough to bear children of her own one day. I hope she will not need to turn to IVF as a second option. Because you are trying to take that away from her, too,” Aniston wrote. Vance responded by calling her “disgusting” for rhetorically alluding to his daughter—without even passing acknowledgment of how disgusting it is to broadly refer to people who don’t have kids as “miserable,” “childless cat ladies.”

Vance has since come under fire, obviously from Democrats but also from some on the right who point out that many people who want to have kids can’t. Of course, no one should be attacked for not having kids for any number of reasons, but this just underscores the extent that Vance’s comments are an incredibly stupid, unforced error.  

Usha told Fox News that her husband “absolutely, at the time and today would never, ever, ever want to say something to hurt someone who was trying to have a family,” adding, “I also understand there are a lot of other reasons why people may choose not to have families, and many of those reasons are very good.” That’s great and all, but Usha isn’t the one running for vice president—if Vance wants to dig himself out of this hole, he’ll have to fish his foot out of his own mouth and clarify his comments, himself. Though, I’m certain his attempt to do so will only make things 300% worse, which, great!

 
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