J.D. Vance isn’t making many friends of late.
Most recently, Donald Trump’s newly-minted running mate has been grilled for resurfaced comments he made to Tucker Carlson in 2022 in which he said the U.S. was being run 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.”
One very popular actress, who has been public about her own struggle to conceive, took umbrage.
“All I can say is… Mr. Vance, I pray that your daughter is fortunate enough to bear children of her own one day,” Jenner Aniston wrote today in a post on her Instagram Story. Aniston, generally very private, has shared her about IVF struggles in the past and coming to accept that “we are complete with or without a mate, with or without a child.”
Of Vance’s two-year-old daughter, Aniston wrote today, “I hope she will not need to turn to IVF as a second option. Because you are trying to take that away from her, too.”
Vance has three children, sons Ewan, 6 and Vivek, 4 and daughter Mirabel, 2.
Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris, one of those Vance dubbed “childless cat ladies,” spoke about Vance’s stances on IVF and abortion in a Kalamazoo, MI campaign speech last week.
“Understand, this is a fellow who — in the United States Senate — participated in blocking protections for IVF. This is an individual who has made every indication that he is for a national abortion ban,” said Harris.
Aniston has been outspoken on the subject before. After endless false tabloid pregnancy stories, the Emmy-winner wrote an essay for the Huffington Post in 2016 about the fixation on her romantic and pregnancy status.
“Here’s where I come out on this topic: We are complete with or without a mate, with or without a child. We get to decide for ourselves what is beautiful when it comes to our bodies. That decision is ours and ours alone,” wrote Aniston. “Let’s make that decision for ourselves and for the young women in this world who look to us as examples. Let’s make that decision consciously, outside of the tabloid noise. We don’t need to be married or mothers to be complete. We get to determine our own ‘happily ever after’ for ourselves.”
Aniston told Allure magazine in 2022 that she had undergone IVF, and the pregnancy rumors made the process all the more difficult.
“All the years and years and years of speculation… It was really hard,” she said. “I was going through IVF, drinking Chinese teas, you name it. I was throwing everything at it.”
In Vance’s 2021 interview with then-Fox News host Carlson, in which he decried so-called “childless cat ladies,” he namechecked Harris, Pete Buttigieg and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
“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,” Vance told Carlson. “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?”
JD Vance says women who haven’t given birth like Kamala Harris are “childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives,” and have “no direct stake” in America. pic.twitter.com/3DJY3pQTGe
— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) July 22, 2024
Harris, it turns out, is actually stepmother to her husband Doug Emhoff’s two children: son Cole, 29, and daughter Ella, 25.
Earlier this afternoon, New York Times White House reporter Katie Rogers noted that Kerstin Emhoff, Doug Emhoff’s ex-wife, had the following to say about attacks on Harris for not having children of her own: “These are baseless attacks. For over 10 years, since Cole and Ella were teenagers, Kamala has been a co-parent with Doug and I. She is loving, nurturing, fiercely protective, and always present. I love our blended family and am grateful to have her in it.”
Kerstin Emhoff, Doug Emhoff’s ex-wife, on Republican attacks on @KamalaHarris for not having children of her own. “These are baseless attacks. For over 10 years, since Cole and Ella were teenagers, Kamala has been a co-parent with Doug and I.” (1/2)
— Katie Rogers (@katierogers) July 24, 2024
Of course, Buttigieg and his husband Chasten also have children, though the adoption process wasn’t exactly easy. Asked about Vance’s comments, Buttigieg took the high road while still making a very sharp point about civility.
“The really sad thing is he said that after Chasten and I had been through a fairly heartbreaking setback in our adoption journey,” Buttigieg said on CNN. “He couldn’t have known that, but maybe that’s why you shouldn’t be talking about other people’s children.”
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