Are Democrats Really the Party of Childlessness?

A.T. Thomas
The Left Is Right
Published in
7 min readJul 31, 2024

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Could J.D. Vance possibly have thought it was true?

By now, everyone reading this has seen Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance’s comment in 2021 referring to vice President Kamala Harris as one of the “childless cat ladies” running the nation who “want to make the rest of the country miserable too.”

He has tried to explain that away by saying “ “If you look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC, the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children.”

There is a baked in assumption here that someone is more likely to be anti-family simply because they don’t have kids. Any one with critical thinking skills — of which there are too few in the US — would be asking to see the research supporting that conclusion. There are many reasons that a family may be childless — infertility, chronic illness, marriage late in life, gay or because they simply don’t think don’t think they’d make good parents. There is no reason to think any of these things make a person hate families.

Many editorials have noted how offensive this comment is and have defended childless people, especially childless women. I share and support their arguments. However, in defending childless women, they’ve bought into the Republican’s basic assumption that the Democratic Party leadership…

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A.T. Thomas
The Left Is Right

Skeptical lawyer/former lobbyist. Concerned about biodiversity and climate change. Ally to those with ME/CFS, Long Covid and similar diseases.