JD Vance’s ‘cat lady’ attacks are just the beginning of Republicans’ childbirth obsession

Trump’s running mate brings the ‘natalist’ movement gripping Silicon Valley CEOs into mainstream GOP politics, Alex Woodward reports

JD Vance speaks to supporters in Virginia on July 22. His recently resurfaced comments about childless adults and birth rates have invited scrutiny into a right-wing natalist movement (Getty Images)

Before he became Donald Trump’s running mate, JD Vance called for higher taxes for childless adults and insisted their votes should count less. He said abortion should be “illegal” nationally, and that the “cat ladies” and the “Kamala Harrises” of the world want to “brainwash” other people’s kids.

Misogynist “cat lady” insults are nothing new, nor is an anti-abortion GOP official advocating nationwide bans on abortion access.

But recently resurfaced remarks from the next potential vice president — and his connections to influential right-wing voices with borderline conspiracy-mongering ideas about childbirth rates — have invited more scrutiny into the natalist movement gripping Republican politics.

Vance has not been shy about his sexual politics, going so far as to call declining birth rates a “civilizational crisis” driven by a “childless left.”

His pro-natalist stumping echoes conservative arguments from prominent right-wing tech evangelists, including his billionaire boosters Peter Thiel and Elon Musk. Blake Masters — another one of Thiel’s political acolytes, who unsuccessfully ran for Senate in Arizona in 2022 — came to Vance’s defense, writing that “political leaders should have children” or “at least be married.”

“If you aren’t running or can’t run a household of your own, how can you relate to a constituency of families, or govern wisely with respect to future generations? Skin in the game matters,” he wrote on July 24.

Musk also has been obsessed with the idea of population decline, joining conservative Christian figures and tech CEOs whose warnings sound more like eugenics than Children of Men.

Kamala Harris, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, is a stepmother. In 2021, Vance criticized her by name as a Democratic official who “doesn’t really have a direct stake” in the country because she did not give birth to her children.

During an appearance on then-Fox News personality Tucker Carlson’s program, Vance claimed that “we are effectively run in this country, via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs, 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.”

“And it’s just a basic fact if you look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, [Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez] — the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children,” he added. “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?”

Vance even said this week that “the substance” of his remarks is “true.”

He told Megyn Kelly that the “cat ladies” remark was “sarcastic,” but “people are focusing so much on the sarcasm and not on the substance … and the substance of what I said, Megyn — I’m sorry, it is true.”

Kerstin Emhoff — second gentleman Doug Emhoff’s ex-wife and mother to Cole and Ella Emhoff — has defended Harris from “baseless attacks” against her. Ella Emhoff shared her mother’s statement on Instagram, adding, “I love my three parents.”

On a 2021 episode of The Charlie Kirk Show podcast, hosted by the far-right activist behind Turning Point USA, Vance said the government should “reward the things that we think are good” and “punish the things that we think are bad.”

“So, you talk about tax policy, let’s tax the things that are bad and not tax the things that are good,” said Vance, who had yet to launch his Senate campaign at the time.

“If you are making $100,000, $400,000 a year and you’ve got three kids, you should pay a different, lower tax rate than if you are making the same amount of money and you don’t have any kids. It’s that simple,” he said.

Vance spokesperson William Martin told ABC News that “the policy Senator Vance proposed is basically no different than the Child Tax Credit, which Democrats unanimously support.”

Vance — a self-described natalist with three children of his own — has previously indicated support for free healthcare associated with giving birth and employer-supported health insurance for working parents who quit their jobs after giving birth.

He also has voiced some support for expanding the child tax credit, which is packaged with other family-friendly policies in President Joe Biden’s budget proposal that was rejected by Republicans.

Trump — whose 2024 platform offers little ideas about childcare policies — refused to answer how his administration would help families pay for the growing costs of care during the June 27 presidential debate.

Elon Musk attends Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to a joint meeting of Congress on July 24. The Tesla CEO and X owner has become an influential figure in Republican politics with pro-natalist views (EPA)

After working at a Silicon Valley firm owned by Thiel, Vance returned to Ohio to run for Senate in 2021. Thiel-backed groups donated more than $15 million to Vance’s successful 2022 campaign, the largest amount ever given to a Senate candidate.

Silicon Valley figures like Thiel have invested millions into natalist-driven biotech projects while encouraging people to have more children to combat what they see as the collapse of economies and society. Musk has argued that declining birthrates are a “much bigger problem” than the climate crisis.

“The fact that we’re not having enough babies, the fact that we’re not having enough children, is a crisis in this country,” Vance said in remarks about a “civilizational crisis” in 2021.

“It’s a crisis because it makes our media more miserable. It’s a crisis because it doesn’t give our leaders enough of an investment in the future of their country. And it’s a crisis because we know that babies are good,” he said.

In his 2021 remarks, Vance argued that parents should have “more power” at the voting booth.

“When you go to the polls in this country as a parent, you should have more power — you should have more of an ability to speak your voice in our democratic republic — than people who don’t have kids,” he said.

Americans should “face the consequences and the reality: If you don’t have as much of an investment in the future of this country, maybe you shouldn’t get nearly the same voice,” according to Vance.

Trump campaign press secretary Karoline Leavitt claimed his statement is “being taken out of context and unfairly attacked” and clarified that people who cannot physically have children are not the “target” of his remarks.

That same year, Vance told Breitbart that “next generation leaders” on the political left — “the AOCs, the Cory Bookers, the Kamala Harrises — they don’t have kids.”

“There’s this weird way where they want to take our kids and brainwash them so that their ideas continue to exist in the next generation,” he said.

Vance’s comments echo those from Hungary’s prime minister Viktor Orban, who in 2022 said that “whether we like it or not, the peoples of the world can be divided into two groups: those that are capable of biologically maintaining their numbers; and those that are not, which is the group that we belong to.”

Vance has also praised Orban’s proposals to provide loans to married couples that they do not have to repay if they have children.

“Why can’t we do that here?” Vance said in 2021. “Why can’t we actually promote family formation?”