As the left ousted President Joe Biden and elevated Vice President Kamala Harris to the top of its 2024 ticket without a single vote being cast for her in that role, they also seemingly turned all of their focus to Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH).
This week, Donald Trump’s running mate came under scrutiny for comments he made three years ago about “childless cat ladies,” with everyone from Hillary Clinton to Jennifer Aniston weighing in.
On Friday’s show, Vance joined Megyn to address the controversy and explain why he believes the Democratic Party is “anti-family.”
The Controversy
Not long after Vance accepted the GOP vice presidential nomination, a July 2021 clip of him being interviewed by Tucker Carlson on Fox News started making the rounds. Vance, who was running for U.S. Senate at the time, was responding to criticism he received for a speech he gave to the conservative Intercollegiate Studies Institute in which he discussed the declining birth rate in the United States and what it means for the future of this country. He also brought up the fact that many top Democrats don’t have children and questioned what kind of a message the party as a whole was sending to young Americans.
Vance was responding to the pushback he received for that speech when he made the now-infamous “childless cat ladies” comment to Carlson:
VANCE: All I am really saying is we are effectively run in this country – be it via the Democrats, be it via corporate oligarchs – by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too.
And 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?
“The Harris team re-circulated the comments this week, leading Democrats and the media – the same media currently re-writing history to tell us Kamala Harris was never the border czar… to immediately pile on,” Megyn noted.
Vance Responds
Vance told Megyn that while he knows the left wants him “to back down” from the comments, he said his critics are choosing to focus on the “sarcasm” rather than the “substance” of what he said. As it relates to the substance, he stands by his position.
“I’m actually glad the left has attacked me over this because I think it started an important conversation about how our society became so profoundly anti-family,“ Vance said. “The simple point that I made is that having children – becoming a father, becoming a mother – I really do think it changes your perspective in a pretty profound way. This is something, of course, we have recognized for hundreds of years in this country and that human civilization has always recognized.”
But he also believes there is a “deeper point” to be made. “It’s not a criticism of people who don’t have children… This is about criticizing the Democratic Party for becoming anti-family and anti-child,” he explained. “We have to ask ourselves: Why do we have masking of toddlers years after the pandemic ended? Why do we have the Harris campaign coming out this very morning and saying that we should not have the child tax credit which lowers tax rates for parents of young children? It’s because they have become anti-family and anti-kid.”
Megyn also asked if Vance “stands by” the more controversial idea he floated in his speech about the “relative value of voting” and the voting rights of parents versus non-parents. “I’m obviously doing a thought experiment there,” he said. “Democrats who talked about giving children the right to vote, I’m saying, ‘Well, if we’re going to give children the right to vote, shouldn’t we give parents the say over how that vote– in so many other areas of life, we say that parents determine what’s best for the children. If we give kids the right to vote, it might as well be true in that scenario, too.”
“Pro-Family” vs. “Anti-Family”
In his view, the 2024 election is between the “pro-family” Republicans and the “anti-family” Democrats. “The Democrats in the past five to 10 years have become anti-family. It’s built into their policy, it’s built into the way they talk about parents and children, and it’s time that we call that out,” he said. “It’s one thing to recognize there are people who don’t have children through no fault or choice of their own, but it’s something else to build a political movement invested, theoretically, in the future of this country when not a single one of them actually has any physical commitment to the future of this country.”
Vance said the state of parenthood and families in the U.S. should be treated “as a crisis,” and the GOP should lead the way on turning things around. “We should send the signal to the culture that we are the pro-family party, and we’re gonna back it up with real policy,” he said. “We’re the party of parents, we’re the party of kids, and we want to fight for parents and children to have good lives.”
Vance on IVF
Democrats have also attempted to tie Vance’s “childless” remark to women’s reproductive rights, specifically in-vitro fertilization. While he voted against the Democratic-sponsored Right to IVF Act last month, he cosigned a separate bill on in-vitro fertilization, titled the IVF Protection Act, that was introduced by Sens. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Katie Britt (R-AL).
“One of the things that has been profoundly dishonest about the media… [is] they’ve taken this incredibly out of context. They say that I’m opposed to IVF or that I’m criticizing people who have fertility problems,” Vance told Megyn. “I said explicitly in my remarks that I wasn’t talking about people who couldn’t have children. I was talking about people who have turned anti-child into the ethnicity of their entire party. That’s a fundamentally different thing.”
He also took issue with people like Aniston who have brought his family into the debate. “You have Hollywood celebrities saying, ‘J.D. Vance, what if your daughter suffered fertility problems?’ Well, first of all, that is disgusting because my daughter is two years old,” he said. “And second of all, if she had fertility problems – as I said in that speech – I would try everything I could to try to help her because I believe families and babies are a good thing.”
When it comes to his position on IVF, Vance said the goal should be to “make it easier for moms and dads to choose life if… they’re in a terrible situation where they have fertility problems.”
But that can’t come at the expense of religious freedom. “I think the problem with the Democrats’ approach on this is they’re trying to take away religious liberty,” he explained. “I think we have to protect the rights of Christian hospitals to operate the way that they want to operate, but… that’s totally consistent with promoting fertility treatments for parents who need it.”
Ultimately, Vance said Republicans “cannot give up an inch” on being pro-family. “If your society is not having enough children to replace itself, that is a profoundly dangerous and destabilizing thing,” he said. “I just think that we have to say having kids is good… that it is not a bad thing to stand up for parents. In fact, it’s the best thing. If our politics isn’t standing up for parents, then what the hell are we doing?”
You can check out Megyn’s full interview with Vance by tuning in to episode 849 on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen. And don’t forget that you can catch The Megyn Kelly Show live on SiriusXM’s Triumph (channel 111) weekdays from 12pm to 2pm ET.