Politicians Don't Need To Be Mom(ala)s

Republicans are trying to attack Kamala Harris (a step-mother) as unqualified due to lack of biological children. It's a desperate move from a party that wants to police women's roles.

This November I plan on voting for our first woman president and let me just say: thank fuck. 

I’m not in full ideological alignment with Kamala Harris, but she has the makings of a better president than Biden on several issues critical to young voters (abortion, Gaza) and more importantly, unlike Biden, Harris can win. Democrats have a fighting chance now. And nothing underscores those improved odds more than the fact that Republicans are visibly struggling to land an attack on Harris. In the first hours of her campaign, they’ve resorted to creepy, sexist talking points that are off-putting to any voter to the left of 4chan.

Among those misguided attacks is the complaint that Harris does not have biological children—only step-children. It’s a stupid line of argument but it’s helpful in highlighting Republicans’ warped notions of family.

“Really simple, underdiscussed reason why Kamala Harris shouldn’t be president,” tweeted Will Chamberlain, a Ron DeSantis campaign veteran and denizen of right-wing think-tanks. “No children. And no, becoming a step-parent to older teenagers doesn’t count.”

Other prominent strivers on the right, including those without children, chimed in to add that only married parents should be allowed to hold office, vote, ect.

This is, very simply, freak shit and most Americans recognize it as such. More than 40 percent of Americans surveyed by Pew Research in 2011 reported having a step-relative, and more than 2.4 million Americans lived with their minor stepchildren in 2021 per U.S. Census data. These families are just as legitimate as those in slightly different configurations, and those parents are just as qualified to vote or hold office as everyone else, non-parents included. Obviously.

But these early attacks are part of a right-wing project of pitching motherhood as mandatory. They’re part of an effort to reorient parenthood away from a relationship of care and toward the policing of gender roles and birth rates. 

Republican vice-presidential nominee J.D. Vance is a loud proponent of this project. In multiple interviews smearing influential women as childless “cat ladies,” Vance has specifically cited Harris as a person unfit to lead, due to her lack of biological children and (by Vance’s telling) lack of “a stake” in the future. This is the tortured logic of the right-wing pro-natalist movement (which Vance has explicitly defended by calling its critics “cat ladies”), which advocates parenthood as a means of “out-breeding” racial and ideological rivals. In this view of parenthood, children are not independent entities but extensions of bloodlines and political lineages. 

Even when feigning support for Black women, Vance falls back on these ideas, implying that abortion rights are bad for Black women because, without them, Black birth rates would rise.

“I certainly would like abortion to be illegal nationally,” Vance said in a 2022 podcast interview, adding that, if abortions were banned in Ohio but legal in California, it would lead to a situation where “everyday George Soros sends a 747 to Columbus to load up disproportionately Black women to get them to go have abortions in California. And of course the left will celebrate this as a victory for diversity.”

Vance, of course, is not interested in supporting Black mothers when forced birth takes a financial toll on their families. He’s on the record demeaning working moms and panning universal childcare (which would help new mothers hold jobs) as an insult to “normal people.” And Vance, like others in his party, is a strong opponent of divorce, even suggesting once that parents should stay in violent marriages because it would be best for their children.

This is the trap of mainstream conservatism and it isn’t even slick. If women are mothers, they shouldn’t work. If women aren’t mothers, they’re not qualified for work. If they’re unmarried, they’re cat-lady losers. If they need to leave a shitty marriage, they’re harming their children.

It’s not hard to see, then, how step-parenthood like Harris’s strikes a blow to this right-wing worldview. It acknowledges that family is something more fluid and voluntary than the rigid nuclear model that Vance et al portray as the only valid option. It understands that we care for children not simply because they’ll extend our biological legacy, but because love is richer and more generous than pure genetic imperative. Step-parenthood reaffirms what all parenthood should be: a choice.

Kamala Harris doesn’t need to have children—biological or otherwise—to run for president. As women, we’re enough on our own.