Vice presidential hopeful Sen. JD Vance tried to clean up his resurfaced attack on “childless cat ladies” in an interview Friday, asserting that he was not criticizing people who do not have children, while accusing Democrats of adopting “anti-family and anti-kid” messaging and policies.
Vance’s response, delivered on conservative media personality Megyn Kelly’s SiriusXM podcast, comes after a yearsold video clip went viral this week which shows him questioning some Democrats for not having biological children — specifically naming Vice President Kamala Harris, now the likely Democratic nominee for president. Harris has two stepchildren.
“Obviously it was a sarcastic comment,” Vance (R-Ohio), Donald Trump’s running mate, said. ”People are focusing so much on the sarcasm and not on the substance of what I actually said … and the substance of what I said, Megyn, I’m sorry, it is true.”
Vance, who has three children, also sought to reposition himself as a defender of parents, describing his previous comments as a criticism of Democrats for taking stances that he said harm families. He specifically accused Harris of opposing the child tax credit after the Harris campaign said on Friday that Vance supported higher taxes for Americans without children — prompting some Republicans, including Vance, to rebut that Democrats are opposed to parents benefiting from the tax code. Harris and Democrats have supported legislation that would expand the child tax credit.
“I know the media wants to attack me and wants me to back down on this, Megyn, but 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,” Vance told Kelly.
Campaign spokesperson Sarafina Chitika in a statement to POLITICO pointed to continuing criticism of Vance’s comments on social media and accused him of “insulting couples struggling with infertility, demeaning women’s choices and their freedoms, and reminding voters about his and Donald Trump’s anti-IVF Project 2025 agenda.”
Vance also called the country’s record-low birth rate — which he said was due to parents who “don’t feel comfortable in this society bringing new life into the world” — a “catastrophic problem.” He then accused Democrats of responding to this issue by suggesting that American children be replaced with immigrants.
“If your society is not having enough children to replace itself, that is a profoundly dangerous and destabilizing thing,” he said.
Trump’s running mate also reiterated his support for in-vitro fertilization, adding that promoting fertility treatments was a moral good that benefited society — and citing how his family friend’s kids were born thanks to IVF. The treatment has become a centerpiece of Democrats’ defense of reproductive rights after the Alabama Supreme Court ruled earlier this year that embryos created through the procedure are children.
While Vance joined Senate Republicans in blocking a Democrat-backed bill to protect IVF, he supported IVF protection legislation sponsored by Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas and Katie Britt of Alabama.
Still, Vance’s response is unlikely to quell the swift criticism of those original comments from many Democrats, in which he told Fox News, “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.”
He also asserted that parents should have “more power” than those without children, of whom he named Harris alongside several other politicians. But in his conversation with Kelly, Vance sought to distance himself from direct criticism of Harris’ family.
“I wish her stepchildren and Kamala Harris and her whole family the very best,” Vance told Kelly. “The point is not that she’s lesser. The point is that her party has pursued a set of policies that are profoundly anti-child.”
Still, the clipped remarks have served as another distraction for a Trump campaign that was reportedly caught off guard by Harris’ sudden ascension to the top of the Democratic ticket — and the ensuing attention on Trump and Vance’s past comments on Harris. Many contenders for Harris’ running mate, who would face Vance on the debate stage and on the campaign trail, have also piled on.
“The really sad thing is he said that after Chasten and I had been through a fairly heartbreaking setback in our adoption journey,” Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, who was singled out by Vance alongside Harris, said in a CNN interview this week. “He couldn’t have known that, but maybe that’s why you shouldn’t be talking about other people’s children.”
Vance added that he has “nothing against cats.”