US Republican vice-presidential candidate JD Vance has faced a firestorm of criticism over a comment from three years ago that resurfaced amid the country’s election campaign in which he suggested that like many in the next generation of leaders of the Democratic Party have no children, they also have no interest in the future of the United States.
Vance’s comment angered not only Democratic Party leaders but also many public figures and some Republican commentators, raising questions about whether his public statements could be hurting former President Donald Trump’s re-election campaign. Trump chose Vance as his running mate ahead of the Republican National Convention in July.
At the center of the debate is a record number of American women choosing not to have children: 21.9 million U.S. women between the ages of 20 and 39 have not given birth in 2022, reaching an all-time low, according to the US Census Bureau. .
So, Vance got the Republican ticket in a soup?
Vance made the comment in a 2021 interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson. In the clip, Vance lamented how the Democratic Party’s emerging leaders are childless, maintaining an unwavering gaze and matter-of-fact tone in his videolink.
The US, Vance said, was being run by “a bunch of childless hotties who are unhappy with their own lives and the choices they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too.”
He named names: “It’s just a basic fact – you look at [Vice President] Kamala Harris, [Secretary of Transportation] Pete Buttigieg, [Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez] AOC – the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children.”
“How does it make sense for us to hand over our country to people who don’t really have a direct interest in it?”
Vance’s comment “offends on many levels,” Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Women and Politics (CAWP), told Al Jazeera. CAWP, which conducts research on women’s participation in U.S. politics, is a unit of Rutgers University’s Eagleton Institute of Politics.
Celebrities such as actress Jennifer Aniston and singer Taylor Swift also criticized Vance.
After the comments resurfaced, Vance justified his earlier statement Friday during an interview with talk show host Megyn Kelly, saying he didn’t mean to attack people who can’t have children, but was criticizing Democrats for becoming “anti-family”. However, he doubled down, saying that “the substance of what I said, Megyn, I’m sorry, is true.”
Why is the US increasingly childless?
Economic factors have played a significant role in the decline in U.S. birth rates. When the economy crashed during the Great Recession in 2008 and 2009, the number of births also fell.
In recent years, other factors have come into play. Birth rates have fallen dramatically during COVID-19. Research by the University of New Hampshire suggests that rising expenses involved in raising children, limited access to child care and family leave, and lower marriage rates are among the drivers of declining birth rates.
Between April and May of this year, the Pew Research Center surveyed more than 2,000 adults ages 50 and older who have never had children, along with 770 adults ages 18 to 49 who do not have children and are unlikely to have any.
According to survey reports, the percentage of U.S. adults under age 50 who are childless and likely never to have children increased by 10 percentage points, from 37 percent in 2018 to 47 percent in 2023.
Most people interviewed said that not having children made it easier for them to buy the things they wanted, save money for the future and have time to spend on hobbies.
Other reasons people don’t have children included the desire to focus on their careers and concerns about the state of the world, including the environment. Twenty percent of respondents under 50 said they simply didn’t like children.
A considerable proportion of people over 50 said they simply hadn’t found the right partner. A large portion of this group also said that there was a time when they wanted to have children.
“A large group of men and women had this in their plans, but it just didn’t work out,” said Ayo Wahlberg, professor in the anthropology department at the University of Copenhagen, referring to research carried out by anthropologist Marcia Inhorn, who surveyed 200 women in USA who froze their eggs.
Inhorn found that some of these women had had multiple relationships that didn’t work out. Wahlberg explained that this was due to the “mating disparity,” where more women are attending higher education than men and simply can’t find the right partner to have children with. He added that “dating apps are changing the way dating happens. People are having a hard time finding their partner.”
He questioned: “As a politician, why would you only blame women in this equation – if you would like people to get married and have children?”
Several of the first US presidents – all men, of course – did not have biological children and instead had stepchildren or adopted children. These include George Washington, James Buchanan, who adopted his orphaned niece, and Andrew Jackson, who also adopted him. James Madison and James Polk had no children.
Who offends Vance’s statement?
Potentially a long list of people, Walsh said.
“It offends people like Kamala Harris, who is a stepmother,” she said. Harris, the presumptive Democratic nominee to face Trump in the election, became stepmother to two children, Ella, now 25, and Cole, now 30, when she married their father, Doug Emhoff, in 2014.
“This offends women who have made a conscious choice, for whatever reason, not to have children,” Walsh continued, adding that it also harms women who have had medical complications conceiving children and require in vitro fertilization (IVF). Six months ago, the conservative-leaning Alabama Supreme Court threatened to make assisted reproduction inaccessible after ruling that embryos are children.
“It offends the people who adopted,” she added. Transportation Secretary Buttigieg and her husband, Chasten Buttigieg, adopted twins in August 2021, the same year Vance made his comment.
In an interview with CNN on July 24, Buttigieg opened up about how Vance’s 2021 comments came after Buttigieg and his husband faced a “heartbreaking setback” in their adoption journey. “He [Vance] I couldn’t know that, but maybe that’s why you shouldn’t talk about other people’s children.”
What does this mean for the US elections?
Vance’s statements likely won’t affect women who are diehard Trump supporters, Walsh said. But they could make it harder for Republicans to attract new female voters. However, it “doesn’t seem” like they are trying to attract women who don’t typically vote Republican, she said.
Walsh said Vance insinuated that “it’s women’s responsibility to procreate and have children, not the kind of thing you might say if you were trying to get more women to support you.”
However, she added that Vance’s comment is one of many made by Republicans that fit a pattern. Trump built his campaign in this election around toughness and masculinity. Walsh pointed out that Trump entered the Republican National Convention with James Brown’s It’s A Man’s World playing in the background.
“At the time, he was running against Joe Biden, so the implication was that he was tougher than Biden, [who was portrayed as] weak and sick. It’s taken on a whole new meaning now that he’s [likely to be] running into a woman,” Walsh said.
What is the next?
Walsh predicts that with Harris on the Democratic ticket, Republicans will try to replicate campaign strategies from the 2016 election, where Trump ran against Hilary Clinton. She hopes the Harris campaign will take notes from the Clinton campaign and do things a little differently — confronting Trump more than Clinton did.
The issue of declining birth rates will continue to be politicized, Wahlberg said.
“In country after country, governments have become actively pro-natalist. They are appealing to their citizens to contribute to the future through procreation,” he said.
But also, Wahlberg added, many are actively choosing not to have children due to fears of a future marked by climate change. “At the very least, we should listen to these concerns about climate change and ensure we live on a habitable planet.”
This story originally appeared on Aljazeera.com read the full story
