The VP candidate’s remarks are drawing criticism from women across the web.
Less than two weeks since Donald Trump announced J.D. Vance as his vice-presidential pick, the Ohio Senator has faced a wave of obstacles, including historically bad polling, the resurfacing of brutal comments he’s made about his new political partner, and rumors (since debunked) that he once confessed to having sex with a couch. But now he’s facing perhaps the most challenging moment of all: blowback from America’s sweetheart.
Jennifer Aniston spoke out against Vance in a slide posted to her Instagram Story on Wednesday, which has drawn headlines around the web as fans react to this rare political statement from the Friends star. But before we get into what she said, let’s take a step back and consider the setup.
What has J.D. Vance said about Americans without children?
After Trump selected Vance to join him on the Republican ticket, footage resurfaced from an interview Vance did on Tucker Carlson Tonight in July 2021, when he was running for his Senate seat. During the conversation, Vance argued that people who don’t have children have “no direct stake” in the future of the United States.
“We’re effectively run in this country via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs, by a bunch of childless cat ladies, who are miserable with their own lives and the choices they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too,” Vance said. He specifically pointed to Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as examples of this phenomenon (though it’s worth noting that Buttigieg and his husband, Chasten Buttigieg, announced the month after Vance made these remarks that they had become parents). You can see the comments in full here:
This clip isn’t the only time Vance has made controversial statements about Americans without children. In a 2021 speech, he argued that parents should have “more power” in elections than those who aren’t parents. He’s also suggested that parents should receive more votes for themselves to account for their underage kids.
“These children are the future of this country, and yet the parents who have them actually have no advantage in our democratic process. They have a smaller voice in some ways — in very many cases — than the people who don’t have any children at all,” he said. “The children who come from these families have no real representative in our democracy. Why don’t we change that? Now some people will say this is radical and this is crazy. The Democrats are talking about giving the vote to 16-year-olds, but let’s do this instead: Let’s give votes to all children in this country, but let’s give control over those votes to the parents of those children.”
What did Jennifer Aniston say about J.D. Vance?
So what does the star of The Morning Show have to do with this? She reposted the “childless cat ladies” clip on Instagram and ripped into Vance, writing, “I truly can’t believe this is coming from a potential VP of the United States.”
“Mr. Vance, I pray that your daughter is fortunate enough to bear children of her own one day. 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,” Aniston added — a reference to Vance having opposed protections for IVF treatment.
The topic is a personal one for Aniston, who has been the subject of tabloid speculation for years about whether she would become a mother and why she ultimately never did so. In 2022, Aniston said “the ship has sailed” and she’s accepted that she won’t have a child, but that the media coverage of her personal choices was devastating.
“I was trying to get pregnant. It was a challenging road for me, the baby-making road,” she told Allure magazine. “All the years and years and years of speculation… It was really hard. I was going through IVF, drinking Chinese teas, you name it. I was throwing everything at it.”
How are Vance’s remarks landing with others who have struggled with fertility?
Vance’s remarks have drawn ire across the board, but Aniston’s perspective as a woman who actively wanted a child but was unable to have one is both painful and painfully common. According to the World Health Organization, infertility affects about 17.5 percent of the adult population across the globe.
Barbara Collura, president and CEO of RESOLVE: The National Infertility Association, issued a statement highlighting the implications of what Vance said: “The ‘childless cat lady’ rhetoric being used to degrade people without children is painful and tone-deaf. People are childfree for many reasons — from grieving the pain of miscarriage to experiencing failed adoptions or rounds of fertility treatments to making their own choice not to have children. For some, living without children doesn’t feel like a choice that they made, but a choice that they live with, despite trying to grow their families. Under no circumstances should living childfree be weaponized in a way that degrades people or their value to society.”
For more on this sensitive topic, check out our extensive coverage on how infertility affects women on an emotional level (and what you should know if your own adult child is experiencing it), plus the most important questions to ask your doctor if you’re dealing with this yourself.
