I’m not a cat lady. In fact, I prefer to play with cute puppies and dogs. I am, however, in my 50s, never married and have no children. I am a professional cisgender (heterosexual) woman.
But I align with the “childless cat ladies” Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, scorned as “miserable” in a 2021 interview unearthed after he was named the Republican vice presidential nominee.
Credit: handout
Credit: handout
Contrary to Vance’s opinion, “childless cat ladies” are not a small, anti-democratic, uncaring group of women who hate families who should be punished for our sin of being childless and who should pay more in taxes or have our votes diluted. We are your sisters, your daughters, your aunts, your neighbors, your cousins. We are business leaders, political leaders and taxpayers. We serve in the military and volunteer in the community. We, too, are patriotic Americans.
Vance might be surprised at how many Americans he offended with his cat ladies comment. Single, unmarried adults in the United States over the age of 25 make up 30% of the overall population. And as many as 57% of those who are single do not even want to date. According to the Census Bureau data, 49% of U.S. adults are single. That’s 132 million unmarried Americans. This includes those who are divorced or widowed as well as those who never married. And by focusing on single women, Vance and his sympathizers miss that more and more men are remaining single.
For a woman who wants children of her own, as I did, there is no greater loss than to be unable to birth them. Millions of women and men, couples and singles, suffer each year in the United States and globally from infertility. If they want to pursue biological children, they will need in vitro fertilization treatments. Many spend tens of thousands of dollars only to have those treatments fail. I was one of those people in my early 30s, when I was preparing for marriage with my then-boyfriend and was excited to start a family. From routine blood tests for an unrelated issue, the doctor discovered I could not conceive because of my yearslong battle with endometriosis, an often silent killer of young women’s fertility.
I lost my boyfriend. He married someone who could give him children. My infertility was a deal-breaker for him. I get it, but it hurt deeply. I felt like a failure as a woman, despite my life successes. I stopped dating and went inward. It was just too hard to have to keep sharing the sad news. A dark depression descended and stayed for years. Having two beautiful nieces helped to ease my pain at not having my own children. I had to go on, but the pain never went away.
I share this to drive home a point about Vance’s callousness. The cat ladies comment showed that Vance is “othering” people who don’t conform to his view of the world: You go to school, you get married and you have children. Any deviation from that path makes a person less worthy, at least to him.
And it’s not just his “cat ladies” views that are a problem. He said a few years ago that abortion should be outlawed in all cases, even in instances of rape or incest. Though Vance recently walked back his extreme anti-abortion position, he voted against the Right to IVF Act in Congress and supports (and even wrote the foreword for) Project 2025, which would give rights to fetuses and perhaps outlaw at least some forms of contraception.
But I have news for Vance — and for former President Donald Trump, now the Republican nominee for president again: This is not 1950s “Leave it to Beaver” America. That America was not great for women or for racial minorities, especially Black Americans. We will not sit idly by as our rights and our place in society are stripped.
I was so troubled by what Vance said about “childless” Americans — he doubled down on his offensive comments just last week — that I created a political action committee for us “childless chicks” to support a truly inclusive society. The November election is bigger than any one of us, but it will take all of us to protect our fundamental rights and freedoms.
To my former party, all I can say is this: You erred greatly when you selected Trump as your nominee again, especially with Vance as his running mate. Republicans are a party deeply out of touch with the 21st-century realities of who people are and how they want to live their lives, and with the fact that America is no longer a nation run by white men who have all the power as the rest of us, including white women, fight for scraps of what is left.
There is a new American freedom, one that includes us all. Yes, even those of us who are childless and like cats (or dogs).
Sophia A. Nelson is the author of “Black Woman Redefined: Dispelling Myths and Discovering Fulfillment in the Age of Michelle Obama” and “E Pluribus One: Reclaiming our Founders’ Vision for a United America.” She is a former GOP counsel for the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee.
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