J.D. Vance is a Nightmare for Moms
Trump's VP pick is an anti-choice birth-rate creep who contrasts working parents with "normal people."
Senator J.D. Vance, Donald Trump’s new vice-presidential running mate is an authoritarian birth rate obsessive who mocks working moms, describes childcare subsidies as an assault on “normal people,” opposes protection for in vitro fertilization, argues against rape and incest exceptions in abortion bans, and suggests that victims of domestic violence should remain married for their children’s sake.
Trump named Vance his running mate on Monday, shutting down speculation that Trump would pick a more moderate VP candidate as part of a play for “unity” and centrist votes. Vance, a freshman senator who made his name with the soft-reactionary memoir Hillbilly Elegy, represents the GOP’s emerging “national conservative” wing, which uses left-tish populist rhetoric and hefty donations from the likes of Peter Thiel to fight for a rigidly hierarchical future, at odds with multicultural democracy.
Vance is not, in other words, the running mate of a presidential candidate concerned with catering to moderate women. Vance is the off-putting pick of a presidential candidate leading in the polls and doubling down on extreme policies—including those that will leave mothers and their children poorer and less free.
The long arc of Vance’s political project has been to cast himself as a voice for an imagined American everyman, while throwing those same workers under the bus at the behest of his Ivy League and venture capitalist colleagues. His breakout book Hillbilly Elegy used a story of childhood hardship in Ohio to launder old stereotypes about the undeserving poor and the need to Return to old visions of rugged individualism and masculinity.
Women do not easily fit into even Vance’s most optimistic messaging about the American worker, because so much of his messaging is nostalgic for mid-century propaganda that pretended women’s natural role was in unpaid domestic work.
This contempt for women as workers often emerges in Vance’s frequent references to “cat ladies” with careers and no children.
“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,” Vance told Tucker Carlson in a 2021 interview, adding that “the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children. How does it make sense that we’ve turned our country over to people who don’t really have a direct stake in it?”
As examples of this supposed phenomenon, Vance name-checked Vice President Kamala Harris (who has step-children), transportation secretary Pete Buttiegieg (a gay man who was weeks away from adopting two children with his husband), and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (a young woman about whom Republicans are clinically deranged). Vance did not name President Joe Biden or any of the other Democratic leaders with children, because this is not actually a good-faith conversation about parenthood, but a campaign to stigmatize anyone who lives outside a heterosexual nuclear family.
Vance ran with the “cat ladies” insult for months, sending out an email with the subject line “No more CAT LADIES,” and deriding a New York Times columnist as “one of many weird cat ladies who have too much power in our country.” “The cat ladies, man. They must be stopped,” Vance tweeted above a poll about fears of having children amid climate change.
A very generous read of these tweets might allow that Vance is comfortable with working women, but wants them to have kids. But Vance likes to pose paid work as existing in opposition to motherhood.
“If your worldview tells you that it’s bad for women to become mothers but liberating for them to work 90 hours a week in a cubicle at the New York Times or Goldman Sachs, you’ve been had,” he tweeted in 2022.
If 90-hour weeks or anti-natalist worldviews were the norm (neither are, Vance’s tweet is ridiculous), a senator like Vance might be inspired to promote childcare policies that make working parenthood a little saner. But Vance is vocally opposed to childcare subsidies!
In 2021, using data from a conservative think-tank about childcare breakdowns across class lines, Vance tweeted that “‘universal child care’ is a massive subsidy to the lifestyle preferences of the affluent over the preferences of the middle and working class.”
Many working-class parents (usually mothers) who leave the paid workforce for full-time childcare do so because their jobs would have barely covered daycare expenses—not to mention the fact that low-paying jobs can be remorselessly shitty in ways that are hostile to parents, like implementing unpredictable schedules that tend to lock workers out of healthcare requirements. Universal childcare would help working families find their footing and give them more bargaining power against employers. In Vance’s telling, however, this subsidy would oppress “normal” Americans.
"’Universal day care’ is class war against normal people,” the venture capitalist tweeted.
Vance likes to co-opt the language of class war like this, divorcing class from its relationship to labor and instead using it to reference an American volk.
As Gabriel Winant wrote in 2023, “Vance wishes to foment what he sees as a class war — not between labor and capital, but between the white citizenry and the ‘elites’ of the universities and the media, who pour poison into the ears of the country and corrode its virtue and integrity by stripping away your jobs, corrupting your kids, and sending drug-laden foreigners into your community. Within this false class politics, the suffering of working-class people is understood in conspiratorial rather than structural terms.”
Because Vance’s ideology depends on the literal labor of mothers to bolster U.S. birth rates against an implied threat from outsiders.
“As a parent of young children and a nationalist who worries about America’s low fertility I can say with confidence that daylight saving time reduces fertility by at least 10 percent,” Vance tweeted in 2020.
The daylight savings thing might have been a gag, but Vance’s birth rate paranoia is serious.
During remarks at the 2019 National Conservatism Conference, Vance remarked that “the most important way to measure a healthy society—is whether the American nation is having enough children to replace itself.”
As a New Yorker writer in attendance noted, the easiest way to boost the U.S. population is to embrace immigration—something Vance’s brand of conservative opposes in favor of an implicit demographic warfare. While Vance sometimes softens the right’s militant birth politics by discussing conservatism in nurturing terms, he supports some of the most draconian policies around abortion and conception.
Vance opposes abortion, without exceptions for rape or incest. When questioned on this stance on the campaign trail, Vance dismissed forced birth as an inconvenience.
“It’s not whether a woman should be forced to bring a child to term, it’s whether a child should be allowed to live, even though the circumstances of that child’s birth are somehow inconvenient or a problem to the society,” Vance said of rape and incest exceptions.
Vance’s anti-choice extremism led him to vote against IVF protections earlier this year. Vance’s vote helped block a bill that would have guaranteed IVF rights, which are under siege as anti-choice advocates argue that a fertilized embryo has the same legal rights as a child.
Forced parenthood, as enacted through anti-choice legislation and the logic of IVF bans, often means pushing mothers into precarious conditions. An unplanned birth can force parents into relationships of dependence or trap them with the wrong partner.
Vance appears unsympathetic. In an address to a Christian school, he suggested that couples should avoid divorce, even in unhappy or violent marriages, because it’s best for the kids.
“This is one of the great tricks that I think the sexual revolution pulled on the American populace, which is the idea that like, ‘well, OK, these marriages were fundamentally, you know, they were maybe even violent, but certainly they were unhappy. And so getting rid of them and making it easier for people to shift spouses like they change their underwear, that’s going to make people happier in the long term,’” Vance said.
“And maybe it worked out for the moms and dads, though I’m skeptical. But it really didn’t work out for the kids of those marriages. And that’s what I think all of us should be honest about, is we’ve run this experiment in real time. And what we have is a lot of very, very real family dysfunction that’s making our kids unhappy.”
A growing cohort of right-wing voices have decried divorce in recent years (nevermind that the divorce rate is actually down). In these activists’ telling, as in Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, family struggles are moral failings, not material challenges. Rather than offer the public programs that could help families achieve stability, Vance’s worldview counsels parents to commit harder to conservative notions of family.
Although he seldom makes it so explicit, Vance’s policies would make that family a restrictive unit for women, who would be pressured to have children, cut off from abortion care, denied childcare measures that could aid their financial futures, and discouraged from divorce even in abusive relationships.
This is not even the “up-by-your-bootstraps” ethos that Vance outlines in Hillbilly Elegy. It's a concerted campaign to drag women down. And he’s just joined the top-polling campaign ticket with a presidential candidate on the cusp of his 80s.