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

MIAMI — 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 declining fertility rate.

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

Vance repeatedly voiced concerns about declining birth rates when he launched his political career in 2021 with a bid for the U.S. Senate in Ohio. His criticism of Vice President Kamala Harris, now the Democratic presidential nominee nomineeand other prominent Democrats as “childless cat ladies” who had no “direct interest” in the country have drawn particular attention since Trump chose 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 has appealed to the pro-natalist movement, which has largely been limited to policymakers, tech executives and venture capitalists.

“There’s no question that the conversation about family life, childbearing, and pronatalism has become much more popular and has gotten a lot of media attention because of J.D. Vance,” said Brad Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia and author of “Get Married.” Vance once called Wilcox “one of my favorite researchers.”

Vance spokespeople did not respond to requests for comment.

Vance, who wrote a best-selling book about his working-class upbringing, has been clear about making family formation a policy priority. He has floated ideas like allowing parents to vote on behalf of their children or following Hungary’s Viktor Orbán’s example by providing low-interest loans to couples with children and tax breaks to women with four or more.

In a May 2021 interview with The Federalist podcast, in which he said he was considering a run for the Senate, Vance described a society without babies and children as “pretty gross and pretty dirty.”

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

Vance has proposed that people without children should pay higher taxes than people with children. That is the spirit of the existing $2,000 child tax credit per qualifying child, which Vance has said he would like to see increased to $5,000. He has also said in interviews that he wants to ban underage pornography, citing it as one of the reasons people are marrying less and having fewer children.

His anti-abortion views are separate from his concerns about birth rates, he says, and he doesn’t think the procedure is really responsible for the decline in fertility.

In several interviews, he argued that policymakers should make it easier for two-parent families to survive on one income, so that one parent can stay home with the children.

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

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

The U.S. was one of the few developed countries with a fertility rate that ensured each generation had enough children to replace itself — about 2.1 children per woman. But the rate has been declining since 2008, falling to about 1.6 in 2023, the lowest rate ever.

Earlier this year, Vance pointed to fertility rates as an argument against US aid to Ukraine.

“No country — not even the United States — in the NATO alliance has replacement birth rates. We don’t have enough families and children to sustain ourselves as a nation, and yet we’re talking about problems that are 6,000 miles away,” he said.

Vance and researchers and experts in the pro-natalist movement also argue that immigrants cannot provide a long-term solution to the decline in birth rates. He has blamed immigrants separately for crime and creating “interethnic conflict.”

Demographers and other experts have predicted for years that declining fertility rates would challenge the social security system as fewer workers are required to support an aging population.

Tech companies like Tesla CEO Elon Musk and venture capitalist Peter Thiel, who donated millions to Vance’s primary, have also spoken out about the declining birthrate.

“We as a nation, as a society, policymakers cannot remain neutral on the issue of the family,” said Oren Cass, who founded a conservative think tank, American Compass, that is closely aligned with the senator.

Cass, a former policy adviser to U.S. Sen. Mitt Romney, said he has known Vance for a decade and has been involved in several events, but he did not speak on behalf of the vice presidential nominee. He criticized how progressives have celebrated what he described as a “do whatever you want” and “all choices are equally valid” culture, while viewing the work of raising a family and raising children as an “indispensable foundation” for the country.

“That obviously doesn’t mean you should make the alternative mandatory or criminal, but it does mean we shouldn’t be neutral about it,” he said.

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 a collective “threat to democracy” to calling both men “weird,” a strategy that coincided with the revelation of Vance’s comments.

Other unlikely critics have also chimed in. Trump-supporting influencer Dave Portnoy said Vance “sounds like an idiot.” Former Republican congressman Trey Gowdy tried unsuccessfully to get an apology out of Vance for his disparaging remarks about childless women on his Fox News show, introducing him with a story about some Catholic nuns he met at an airport.

Actress Jennifer Aniston, who has been open about her fertility issues, said she hopes Vance’s daughter doesn’t face the same issues and that she “really can’t believe this is coming from a potential vice president of the United States.” Vance responded by calling her Instagram comment “disgusting.”

Trump has come to his defense by accusing Democrats of twisting the facts and showing empathy for people who don’t marry or have children and are “just as good.”

“He loves family. I think a lot of people love family. And sometimes it doesn’t work,” Trump said in an interview. “But you’re just as good, in many cases much better than someone who’s in a family situation.”

Vance’s wife also tried to limit the damage by saying that Vance wasn’t referring to people who have fertility problems or are unable to conceive for medical reasons. The ideas he proposes, however, don’t make that distinction.

“The reality is he was joking to make a point that he wanted to make and that was substantive,” Usha Vance told an interviewer on “Fox and Friends.”

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

“The challenge for J.D. Vance is to capture that attention and translate it into a more concrete policy agenda that is attractive to everyday Americans and to articulate a clear and positive agenda to make family formation both more affordable and more attractive,” Wilcox said.

Supporters at a recent Trump rally in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, dismissed Vance’s claim that parents should have more voting rights than childless adults and expressed complicated feelings about his views.

Kenneth “Nemo” Niemann, 70, said Vance may have been speaking figuratively about giving parents more of a voice. His wife, Carol, 65, disagreed, saying Vance has made it crystal clear that that is exactly what he means.

The Niemanns had children later in life — their twins are 16 — and have spent much of their adult lives as childless adults. And while they discussed how adults with children might have more say in policies affecting children or how they might have a different view of the future than childless adults, they still disagreed with Vance.

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

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