Three years ago, as a Senate candidate, JD Vance took aim at what he dubbed “the childless left” whose “rejection of the family” was undermining the country.
“Why have we let the Democrat party become controlled by people who don’t have children?” he asked. “Why is this just a normal fact of American life, that the leaders of our country should be people who don’t have a personal and direct stake in it via their own offspring, via their own children and grandchildren?”
Those comments recently resurfaced, and Vance has doubled down, referring broadly to the “childless cat ladies” of the left.
Setting aside the political dust-up over tone policing and word choices, is Vance’s fundamental observation true? It is. However inartful the phrasing, his premise—that our country’s political power centers are increasingly being led by those without children—is correct.
Conservatives lost the culture war decades ago, and as a result we are living not just under the political but also the corporate and cultural power of left-leaning CEOs, entertainment figures, and political leaders, many of whom do not have children, do not want them, and who adhere to an ideology that is either indifferent to or actively hostile toward traditional family life. Taken together with the well-documented phenomenon that Americans are having far fewer children, Vance's statement becomes not just true, but prophetic. We are demographically destined to be governed by the childless.
These trend lines will reshape our culture, our economy, and our politics in profound ways, and it shouldn’t be controversial to say so. Having children has always been a tether to sanity. As humans we are hard-wired to create a better home for our progeny, and to protect what is ours—most notably, the exquisite and unrepeatable bond between parent and child.
But as childrearing becomes the exception, rather than the rule, as a country we become less viscerally beholden to each other and to the future. Atomization, narcissism, and nihilism take root. And the excesses of left-leaning ideologies, which always have at their end subjection of the family to the state, relentlessly move forward, untempered by biological bonds.
Vance’s “cat lady” critique is undoubtedly aimed at this group—whether literally childless or not—who dismiss the importance of the nuclear family and hold parental prerogatives in contempt. But there is a different group of women unwittingly caught up in this debate: a generation of women not childless by choice or politics or biological prohibition, but by dint of a culture that betrayed them.
Older millennials and young GenXers raised in the “Sex and the City” milieu of the late 1990s and early 2000s were surrounded by a monoculture where pregnancy and childbearing were seen as barriers to success, socially unsophisticated, and generally to be avoided until at least the age of 30. Not getting pregnant was the paramount goal. Rather than instructing women about their natural fertility windows and cycles, doctors handed out birth control like candy, minimized the risks of abortion procedures, and offered abortion pills as part of the responsible woman’s safe sex practices.
Avoiding emotional entanglements too soon—and all the one-night stands and years-long, non-committal relationships that entailed—were seen as a rite of passage. Get the degree, the corner office, travel the world, do all of that before kids. Find a partner and have kids at some future, hazy point when you’re “ready.”
The tragedy is that many of these women, in choosing this path, weren’t girlbossing to make a political statement. Many of them wanted children. In putting off marriage and pregnancy, they genuinely believed, and were told by the leading political, medical, and media institutions, that they were doing things the “right” way.
But now, at the moment they want children, they’ve found they cannot have them. They’ve run out the clock on their own fertility, or are facing riskier pregnancies, high miscarriage rates, or the steep monetary and physical costs of reproductive technologies that aren't guaranteed to work.
For these women, the intensity of their response to Vance’s comments is, at its root, a spasm of primal grief for what has been lost. In the most painful of ironies, the culture that told them to embrace their individual agency by avoiding children has inadvertently removed their agency to now choose them.
The pain of these women—betrayed and lied to by institutions claiming to have their best interests at heart—are a case study of what happens when the right cedes the argument to leaders, political and otherwise, who could care less about family formation.
Vance’s comments are a timely reminder that a culture and a politics receptive to children and families do not just happen. They must be encouraged with policy, but also tended to with honesty. We must be graceful in those efforts, but also unyielding toward the cultural forces and the leftist politics that seek to tear down and replace the generational bonds of family with the self or the state.
Rachel Bovard is vice president of programs at the Conservative Partnership Institute.
First Things depends on its subscribers and supporters. Join the conversation and make a contribution today.
Click here to make a donation.
Click here to subscribe to First Things.
Image by H. Guérault, provided by Wikimedia Commons, public domain. Image cropped.
