Childless Cat Ladies vs The Handmaid's Tale

Should people without biological children be allowed to vote? (JD Vance says no.)

Pulled down in front of the blackboard, where once there would have been a map, is a graph, showing the birthrate per thousand, for years and years: a slippery slope, down past the zero line of replacement, and down and down.

Of course, some women believed there would be no future, they thought the world would explode. That was the excuse they used, says Aunt Lydia. They said there was no use in breeding. Aunt Lydia’s nostrils narrow: such wickedness. They were lazy women, she says…

-Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale (1985)

The fact that we’re not having enough babies, the fact that we’re not having enough children, is a crisis in this country… We care about children because we’re not sociopaths and we don’t want to live in a country of sociopaths.

-JD Vance (September 2021)

Childless Cat Ladies

In 2021, GOP VP candidate J.D. Vance told Fox News,

"It's just a basic fact — you look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC — the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children. And how does it make any sense that we've turned our country over to people who don't really have a direct stake in it?"

(via NPR)

Vance doubled down on this in September 2021, as he listed probable future Democratic candidates for President of the United States (after conveniently and explicitly leaving out Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden, and Hillary Clinton:

I’m going to get in trouble for this… Separate Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, and Joe Biden, the three elder Democrat politicians who have run for president before. Um, except for Biden, may not run for president again. Consider all of the next gen of the Democrat Party…. The names are obvious, they’re well-known people: Kamala Harris, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, who’s now the Secretary of Transportation, Corey Booker, AOC, think all these people [sic]. They’re different, they come from different walks of life, different parts of the country. What is the one thing that unites every single one of them? Not a single one of them has any children. Why is that? Why have we let the Democrat Party become controlled by people who don’t have children?

Shortly thereafter, Vance goes on to say that “many of the most unhappy, and most miserable, and most angry people in our media are childless adults.”

This says a lot about how Vance frames “parenthood.”

Buttigieg and his husband adopted twins in August 2021, the month before Vance’s second set of remarks, and Harris is helping to raise her stepchildren with husband Doug Emhoff.

Even if Vance didn’t know about Buttigieg’s children, his comments raise a lot of questions about what he thinks give a person “a stake in” America. Do they have to have biological children? Do they have to be in a “traditional marriage”? Are blended families not American? (As for AOC, is it un-American for a woman in her early ‘30s not to have children?)

And, in addition, these are silly arguments, cherry-picking only prominent Democrats who Vance believes or pretends don’t have kids (and don’t meet his explicitly heterosexual and non-adoptive definition of a “traditional family”). Gavin Newsom, for example, has four children. Vice Presidential candidate Tim Walz has two. Ilhan Omar has two children.

But most of all, it’s stupid to say that people without children— presumably, biological children— don’t have a “physical commitment in this country,” as Vance later does in the same speech, and it reveals a deep, limiting cynicism about who we care about and how we care for others. I taught hundreds of children over the past sixteen years, and I want all of them to grow up in a secure, free, diverse society. I care deeply about their futures, and the futures of my nieces and nephews— one of which is transgender.

And I don’t have— and may never have— biological children.

My wife and I have never ruled out having children (and have at times considered fostering or adoption), but we also ran out our prime child-having years while we were still both teaching public school, while she was working to pay off or have forgiven a public service student loan that at several points seemed like it might never be forgiven— particularly under once-and-would-be-future Education Secretary Betsy DeVos— and while the political environment seemed to be tilting ever more toward dystopia.

For me, the stress of working with and caring for other people’s kids all day for sixteen years (mostly the rewarding kind of stress, but stress nonetheless), combined with relatively low pay and the feeling that I would almost inevitably burn out— which I ultimately did— were large factors in making me reluctant to have our own children. It felt irresponsible to expand our family when every year I felt like I was going to have to quit my job and enter an uncertain job market.

And then, as we both got much closer to 40, the world was hit with an ongoing worldwide pandemic.

And of course, we’re not alone in having more complex reasons for not having kids than would-be fighters in the “culture war on traditional American values” like J.D. Vance suggest. (It is striking that immediately after using this phrase, Vance defends the baker who discriminated against gay customers and then complains about “learning more acronyms” to identify queer people, because while he claims the culture war is being fought by elites against “working class Americans,” it seems clear his war is at least part against LGBTQ+ Americans.)

Living in a state which has been constantly— and ultimately successfully— trying to pass extremely restrictive bans on abortions hasn’t helped. During one of the low points in the national abortion debate, the “conservative” South Carolina Freedom Caucus even pushed a bill that would have applied the death penalty to women who obtained abortion services. (The bill was so outrageous that even Moms for Liberty ally and proud culture warrior April Cromer, who definitely supported and co-sponsored that bill, denied she had ever done so.)

My wife and I, when we discussed children, also worried— like many Americans— that if she were to become pregnant and face a health issue— like a miscarriage— that requires a medical abortion, she wouldn’t be able to obtain one in this state.

I worried about bringing a child into a country that has been abandoning large parts of its public education system in slow motion for decades, and has, thanks to the efforts of privatization fanatics exploiting the pandemic, rapidly accelerated this process.

And I worried that, as teachers, we would never be able to afford a secure enough life to care effectively for children.

For the record, we are cat people. We have three. Sometimes we joke about them like they are our human children. They have insurance. We hang stockings for them on Christmas.

Their insurance is also a fraction of what we would pay to add human children to our own.

We don’t have to worry that there is a growing movement to take away funding that would help them eat lunch at school or be protected from discrimination at school— because they don’t go to school.

And unlike human children ages 1-17, their leading statistical cause of death is not guns.

As experts recently told the New York Times, many of these reasons, along with declining fertility in the “developing world,” might help explain why American’s are having fewer children. The 2008 recession, the job market, pessimism about the future, and other factors have led many younger Americans to either forego or delay having children.

And of course there are countless other reasons: improvements in genetic testing that allow people with severe inheritable conditions, personal family issues that make parenthood emotionally or psychologically difficult, a desire to have free time, a desire to focus on careers or other passions. The list goes on and on.

If the GOP hopes to present itself as the “party of families,” it may want to stop empowering radicals who mock the childless while putting up one roadblock after another for people who do want to have children, or to send them to well-resourced public schools, or to keep them from dying as a result of gun violence. And if any group wants to encourage Americans to have babies, they might want to present a more hopeful view about the future, and real reforms, like better school funding, paid parental leave, and programs to help new and expectant mothers.

The defund, defund, defund mantra of many “conservative” extremists (often presented disingenuously through policies like “universal school choice”), coupled with a growing and paradoxical big government push by many of those extremists into the healthcare decisions of American women, are not going to reverse the declining birth rate.

The Handmaid’s Tale

Beyond all this, the rhetoric behind “childless cat ladies” is uncomfortably natalist. It feels more like a way for scared white men to combat their primary fear— that they will be “replaced” by nonwhites (or non-men)— a theory that we don’t have to speculate leads to violence, because it already has.