Another day, another set of out of touch statements made by JD Vance. This time, the Republican running mate to Donald Trump was given a coveted spot in the New York Times platform to air his ideas about women who aren’t interested in having children due to climate change.
In an interview published over the weekend with journalist and Opinion Audio podcast host for The Times, Lulu Garcia-Navarro, Vance described it as “very crazy” for women not to have children due to climate crisis concerns.
Vance argued that the US has turned “almost pathologically anti-child” and that deciding to not have children due to climate change concerns is “bizarre.”
He went on to describe what he saw as a “pathological frustration with children”, saying it was “very dark” and saying that it is “sociopathic” to think about climate change when deciding whether or not to have children.
“I think you see it sometimes in the political conversation, people saying, well, maybe we shouldn’t have kids because of climate change,” he said. “You know, when I’ve used this word sociopathic? Like, that, I think, is a very deranged idea: the idea that you shouldn’t have a family because of concerns over climate change.”
“I think that is a bizarre way of thinking about the future. Not to have kids because of concerns over climate change?… Yeah, I think that’s a really, really crazy way to think about the world.”
Perhaps the Ohio senator isn’t aware of how volatile it can be to have children when the world is suffering from climate change disasters. Perhaps he isn’t aware of the strong link between certain climate shocks and higher instances of domestic violence, or that women bear the burden of labour when systems in the family unit or workplace are ruptured due to climate-induced disasters.
Research shows that parents across the world, including in the US, are really concerned about the impact of climate change on their children’s future. It also plays a big role in people’s decisions about whether they will have children, or how many children they will have.
And isn’t making an informed, considered decision about not only the impact of climate change on the prospective future of your children, but also the impact of having children on the state of an overpopulated world, the very furthest thing from “sociopathic”?
Meanwhile, when asked about his “childless cat ladies” comment from 2021 though, Vance admitted that it was “dumb.”
“Look, they were dumb comments…I think most people probably have said something dumb, have said something that they wish they had put differently,” he said, reiterating that he was not talking about “people who it just didn’t work out for, for medical reasons, for social reasons, like set that to the side, we’re not talking about folks like that.”
“What I was definitely trying to illustrate ultimately in a very inarticulate way is that I do think that our country has become almost pathologically anti-child,” he said.
It seems more likely that the Republican VP candidate simply likes to rock the boat and make incendiary remarks (just like his boss). Less than one month out from the election, he is doing all he can to stay relevant and in the news. In American politics, the more controversial your opinion, the better.
In his latest interview on the weekend, Vance was asked to comment on his previous controversial remarks, including one from 2014 when he said he hated the police, and his thoughts on a national abortion ban.
“I’m OK with the states making these decisions, even if they make decisions that JD Vance or Donald Trump might not make,” he responded regarding a national abortion ban.
During the Vice Presidential debate earlier this month against Tim Waltz, Vance falsely stated that he “never supported a national abortion ban” and would instead support “some minimum national standard.”
Of course, this claim was quickly fact-checked and found to be untrue. In 2022, while running for the Senate, Vance told the Very Fine People podcast he “certainly would like abortion to be illegal nationally.”
At the time, he also backed a proposal to impose a federal abortion ban on abortion at 15 weeks of pregnancy.
In August, an audio-clip of Vance speaking with a conservative talk show host in 2020 was released and revealed Vance to be agreeing to the belief that helping to raise children “is the whole purpose of the postmenopausal female.”
Clearly, Vance truly believes that women are all meant to become mothers. If you don’t think that’s a dangerous ideology to espouse, think on this: in September 2021, Vance was giving a talk at Pacifica Christian High School in Southern California when he suggested that people in abusive marriages shouldn’t get divorced.
The Ohio Republican Senate nominee at the time said that people should be more willing to stay in unhappy marriages for the sake of their children, mourning how people today “shift spouses like they change their underwear.”
“This is one of the great tricks that I think the sexual revolution pulled on the American populace, which is the idea that like, ‘well, OK, these marriages were fundamentally, you know, they were maybe even violent, but certainly they were unhappy,” Vance said. “And so getting rid of them and making it easier for people to shift spouses like they change their underwear, that’s going to make people happier in the long term.’”
“And maybe it worked out for the moms and dads, though I’m skeptical. But it really didn’t work out for the kids of those marriages. And that’s what I think all of us should be honest about, is we’ve run this experiment in real time. And what we have is a lot of very, very real family dysfunction that’s making our kids unhappy.”
“Culturally, something has clearly shifted. I think it’s easy but also probably true to blame the sexual revolution of the 1960s. My grandparents had an incredibly chaotic marriage in a lot of ways, but they never got divorced, right? They were together to the end, ’til death do us part. That was a really important thing to my grandmother and my grandfather. That was clearly not true by the 70s or 80s.”