When President Joe Biden endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris as the Democratic nominee for president, her critics quickly leaned into the childless cat lady narrative.
“Really simple, underdiscussed reason why Kamala Harris shouldn’t be President,” lawyer and conservative commentator Will Chamberlain wrote on X. “No children.”
“And no,” he continued, “becoming a step-parent to older teenagers doesn’t count. The concerns of parents and families will always be abstract to her.”
His comments harken back (these guys love to harken back) to 2021 comments from JD Vance, now Donald Trump’s running mate, who referred to Harris and other Democratic leaders as “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.”
RIP my blood pressure.
“How does it make any sense,” Vance said in the newly resurfaced Fox News interview, “that we’ve turned our country over to people who don’t really have a direct stake in it?”
It would be easy to craft a long list of people who’ve never given birth and still managed to have a direct — and profound — stake in our country’s history: Susan B. Anthony. Rosa Parks. Every American president ever, as author Janey Godley pointed out.
But that’s not really the point. Not the most salient one anyway.
The point is the entire critique is a straw man fallacy. If you want to elect someone based on how they’ll answer the concerns of parents and families, look at their policy proposals for the concerns of children and families.
Harris is a long-time advocate for forgiving student debt (something 43.2 million Americans are carrying around), has been the White House’s leading voice on reproductive rights (including protecting access to treatments for infertility, which impacts 1 in 8 couples), is a staunch defender of the Affordable Care Act (which provides health care coverage to 21.3 million people), is consistently outspoken on the need to protect LGBTQ rights and, as The 19th News summarized in a “Momala Economy” roundup, is a vocal advocate of paid family and medical leave and affordable child care.
On the other hand: Project 2025, the 920-page policy blueprint for a Trump presidency created by the Heritage Foundation, calls for abolishing the Department of Education, ending the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, prohibiting Planned Parenthood from receiving Medicaid funds, severely curtailing reproductive rights, protecting adoption centers that deny service to LGBTQ+ married couples and eliminating Head Start — an early childhood education program that serves more than 800,000 families in all 50 states.
But those are inconvenient truths. So her critics point and laugh and deflect. “Haha, look at the childless cat lady pretending she knows about families.”
And they have reason to believe it will work. We live in a culture that struggles, still, to embrace women whose power and identity isn’t derived from motherhood.
“At 34, (Taylor) Swift remains unmarried and childless,” John Mac Ghlionn wrote in a viral Newsweek column earlier this summer. “It’s crucial to consider what kind of example this sets for young girls. While Swift’s musical talent and business acumen are certainly admirable, even laudable, we must ask if her personal life choices are ones we want our sisters and daughters to emulate.”
This was just a few short weeks after NFL kicker Harrison Butker used his college commencement address to tell “the ladies present today” where their priorities ought to lie.
“Some of you may go on to lead successful careers in the world,” Butker said, “but I would venture to guess that the majority of you are most excited about your marriage and the children you will bring into this world. I can tell you that my beautiful wife, Isabelle, would be the first to say that her life truly started when she began living her vocation as a wife and as a mother.”
These takes are a dime a dozen and easy to wave away with an eye roll. But they take place against a backdrop of policies and programs that steer women toward motherhood whether they want it or not: Schools that limit access to evidence-based education about avoiding pregnancy, legislation that curtails birth control access, widespread rolling back of abortion rights.
It all adds up to a mean-spirited, narrow-minded agenda covered in a false patina of being pro-family.
The concerns of parents and families will always be abstract to her? Really? Which families?
Because families look a lot of different ways. Families are blended. Families are nuclear. Families are straight. Families are gay. Families are bursting at the seams with children. Families are childless. Families are up to their eyeballs in stock options. Families are up to their eyeballs in debt. Families arrived here centuries ago — by choice or by force — and families arrived here last month.
Families, like this nation, are messy and beautiful and diverse and vulnerable and resilient and flawed and working on it. And they are — all of them — deserving of social systems and structures and policies that protect them from harm, preserve their rights and promote their health and happiness.
But that requires imagination and collaboration and empathy and acknowledging that the status quo isn’t working — hasn’t, in fact, worked for a lot of folks for a lot of years.
It’s easier to demonize. It’s easier to ostracize. It’s easier to point and laugh.
I think America knows better. We’ll see.
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