Beyond ‘childless cat ladies,’ JD Vance has long been on a quest to encourage more births

MIAMI (AP) — Five summers ago, Donald Trump’s running mate JD Vance — then a 34-year-old memoirist and father of a 2-year-old boy — took the stage at a conservative conference and tackled an issue that would become a core part of his political brand: the United States’ declining fertility rate.

“Our people aren’t having enough children to replace themselves. That should bother us,” Vance told the gathering in Washington. He outlined the obvious concern that Social Security depends on younger workers’ contributions and then said, “We want babies not just because they are economically useful. We want more babies because children are good. And we believe children are good, because we are not sociopaths.”

Vance repeatedly expressed alarm about declining birth rates as he launched his political career in 2021 with a bid for the U.S. Senate in Ohio. His criticism then of Vice President Kamala Harris, now the Democratic presidential nominee, and other high-profile Democrats as “childless cat ladies” who didn’t have a “direct stake” in the country have drawn particular attention since Trump picked him as his running mate.

The rhetoric could threaten the Republican ticket’s standing with women who could help decide the November election. But it’s delighted those in the pro-natalist movement that has, until now, been limited largely to policy wonks, tech executives and venture capitalists.

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“There’s no question the discussion around family life, childbearing and pronatalism has gotten a lot more popular and gotten media attention because of JD Vance,” said Brad Wilcox, the director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia and author of “Get Married.” Vance once referred to Wilcox as “one of my favorite researchers.”

Vance’s spokespeople did not respond to messages seeking comment.

An aspiring politician’s war against ‘anti-child ideology’

Vance, who wrote a bestseller about his working-class upbringing, has been clear about making family formation a policy priority. He has suggested ideas such as allowing parents to vote on behalf of their children or following the example of Hungary’s Viktor Orbán of giving low-interest loans to married couples with children and tax exemptions to women who have four children or more.

In a May 2021 interview with The Federalist’s podcast in which he said he was exploring a Senate run, Vance described a society without babies and kids as “pretty icky and pretty gross.”

“We owe something to our country. We owe something to our future. The best way to invest in it is to ensure the next generation actually exists,” he said. “I think we have to go to war against the anti-child ideology that exists in our country.”

Vance has suggested people without children should pay higher taxes than people who have children. That’s the spirit of the existing child tax credit at $2,000 per qualifying child, which Vance has said he’d love to see raised to $5,000. He has also mentioned in interviews he wants to ban pornography for minors, citing it as one of the causes for why people are marrying less and having fewer children.

His anti-abortion views, he has said, are separate from his concerns on birth rates, arguing the procedure is not really driving the decline in fertility.

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In several interviews, he’s argued policymakers should make it easier for two-parent households to be able to live on a single wage so that one of the parents can stay home with their children.

“The ruling class is obsessed with their jobs. Even though they hate a lot of their jobs, they are obsessed with their credentials and they want strangers to raise their kids,” he told then-Fox News host Tucker Carlson in 2021. “But middle-class Americans, whatever their station in life, they want more time with their children.”

Vance had a chaotic childhood raised mainly by his grandparents in southwestern Ohio and a mother who battled substance abuse, and her “revolving door of father figures” as he described in his book. He is now married to a trial lawyer he met at Yale Law School. The couple has three young children, who he has said attend preschool. Usha Vance left the law firm where she worked shortly after her husband was chosen as Trump’s running mate.

Declining births in an aging America

The U.S. was one of only a few developed countries with a fertility rate that ensured each generation had enough children to replace itself — about 2.1 kids per woman. But the number has been sliding since 2008 and in 2023 dropped to about 1.6, the lowest rate on record.

Earlier this year, Vance cited fertility rates in arguing against American support for Ukraine.

“Not a single country — even the U.S. — within the NATO alliance has birth rates at replacement level. We don’t have enough families and children to continue as a nation, and yet we’re talking about problems 6,000 miles away,” he said.

Vance as well as researchers and experts on the pro-natalist movement also argue that immigrants can’t provide a long-term fix to the decline in birth rates. He has separately blamed immigrants for crime and creating “inter-ethnic conflict.”

Demographers and other experts for years had predicted declining fertility rates would pose challenges for the Social Security system as fewer workers are supporting a growing aging population.

Tech executives such as Tesla CEO Elon Musk and venture capitalist Peter Thiel, who donated millions for Vance’s primary race, have also been vocal about the decline in birth rates.

“We as a nation, as a society, policymakers can’t be neutral on the question of family,” said Oren Cass, who founded a conservative think tank, American Compass, that is closely aligned with the senator.

Cass, a former policy adviser for U.S. Sen. Mitt Romney, said he has known Vance for a decade and partnered on several events but said he was not speaking on behalf of the vice presidential nominee. He criticized how progressives have celebrated what he described as a culture of “you do you” and “all choices are equally valid,” when he considered the work of forming a family and raising children an “indispensable foundation” for the country.

“That’s not to say, obviously, that you mandate or criminalize the alternative, but it is to say that we shouldn’t be neutral about it,” he said.

Vance on the defense

Vance’s views on birth rates have contributed to his rocky rollout as Trump’s running mate. Democrats went from labeling Trump and his Republican allies as a collective “threat to democracy” to calling both men “weird,” a strategy that coincided with Vance’s comments coming to light.

Other unlikely critics have also piled on. Trump-backing influencer Dave Portnoy said Vance “sounds like a moron.” Former Republican congressman Trey Gowdy tried unsuccessfully to force an apology out of Vance for his denigrating of childless women on his Fox News show, introducing him with a story about a pair of Catholic nuns he met at an airport.

Actress Jennifer Aniston, who has been open about her fertility issues, weighed in by saying she hopes Vance’s daughter does not face the same problems and she “truly can’t believe that this is coming from a potential VP of the United States.” Vance responded by calling her Instagram reaction “disgusting.”

Trump has come to his defense, accusing Democrats of spinning things and expressing empathy for people who don’t get married or have children and are “every bit as good.”

“He likes family. I think a lot of people like family. And sometimes it doesn’t work out,” Trump said in one interview. “But you’re just as good, in many cases a lot better than a person that’s in a family situation.”

Vance’s wife has also tried to do some damage control, saying Vance was not referring to those who struggle with fertility or can’t get pregnant for medical reasons, though the ideas he proposes don’t make that distinction.

“The reality is he made a quip in service of making a point he wanted to make that was substantive,” Usha Vance told an interviewer on “Fox and Friends.”

Can Vance advance this?

Wilcox, the author of “Get Married,” said JD Vance now needs to focus on convincing a broader audience that his ideas are worth pursuing.

“The challenge for JD Vance is taking that attention and translating it into more of a concrete policy agenda that would be compelling to ordinary Americans and articulating a clear and positive agenda around making family formation both more affordable and more appealing,” Wilcox said.

Supporters at a recent Trump rally in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, shrugged off Vance’s assertion that parents should have more of a vote than childless adults and expressed complicated feelings about his views.

Kenneth “Nemo” Niemann, 70, said Vance might be speaking figuratively about giving parents more votes. His wife, Carol, 65, disagreed, saying Vance has been crystal clear that that is exactly what he means.

The Niemanns had children later in life — their twins are 16 — and they spent far more of their adult lives as childless adults. And while they talked about how adults with children can have more to say when it comes to policies affecting children or they can have a different worldview about the future than childless adults, they still disagreed with Vance.

“My sister never had children, but I can’t imagine my vote means more than hers,” Carol Niemann said.

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Associated Press writers Michelle R. Smith in Providence, Rhode Island, Mike Schneider in Orlando and Marc Levy in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, as well as Associated Press researcher Jennifer Farrar in New York, contributed to this report.