This Childless (Dog) Lady Would Like a Word

re J.D. Vance’s bullsh*t statements about childless women

Content warning: infertility

Most days, my infertility isn’t even an afterthought. The complicated invisibilities of barrenness barely register. There were times, a few years into marriage, when I grieved the arrival of cramps and blood, those brutal reminders of another missed fertility window. Well-intentioned friends had started asking about our plans to procreate, commenting on the house we bought and the spare bedroom that would be a perfect nursery. 

In the few years that we connected with other young couples at our new church, when we had been married less than five years and still felt like newlyweds, the announcements started coming in. Texts and phone calls and coffee dates. Formerly childless couples were now expecting and we still very much weren’t. My friends were caught up in preparation, connecting with new friends who also had children, who understood pregnancy and birth and child-rearing.

There was always an expectation we’d have children. When my husband and I were dating, we skirted the conversation, said we wanted children because we honestly thought we did. We were young and dumb and naive about contraception, but we did our best and it (thankfully) worked. I never had a single scare. I wondered if I was supposed to.

After five years, we still didn’t feel ready or particularly eager to be parents, but we also felt a void, as if we couldn’t relate to our friends as childless no-longer-newlyweds. And so we did what people do—removed every barrier and assumed pregnancy would happen quickly. But it didn’t. Every subsequent period felt like a slap and a relief. I don’t know how to explain such simultaneous emotions, how I both wanted a pregnancy and didn’t. 

Time passed and people stopped asking. It wasn’t until this year that I finally said the words out loud, admitted my contentment with an infertile womb. I hadn’t chosen it, but it almost felt like an unexpected gift.

I possess a uterus and a husband but I have no children. I’m not childless by choice and also not depressed (anymore) by this reality of my supposed malfunctioning parts. And there are benefits—like booking tickets on a whim to Lisbon and Tokyo, going to the movies without having to hunt down a babysitter, starting grad school at 35, and eating chocolate cake for dinner as Geraldine DeRuiter details in her food memoir. 

But I write these vulnerable words because I am angry. Because I watched a now-viral, resurfaced video of current vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance saying, “When you go to polls in this country as a parent, you should have more power, you should have more of an ability to speak your voice in our democratic republic than people who don’t have kids. Let’s face the consequences and the reality. If you don’t have as much of an investment in the future of this country, maybe you shouldn’t get nearly the same voice.” An MSNBC article says “the footage underscores the [senator’s] ire toward people without children” as if there’s not a million reasons for childlessness, as if it’s anyone’s business but our own.

I’m angry at the cat lady rhetoric, the sweeping generalizations of women (who are legion) who are childless with pets (or without them). I’m angry that women in authority and leadership are accused of “taking over,” revealing some men’s desires for women to have no roles beyond motherhood, no identity beyond mother. I’m angry at being told my stake is less, as if I can only care about the next generation if I’ve physically contributed to it, as if my investment hinges on offspring alone. I’m angry at being called miserable as if I can’t know joy, fulfillment, or purpose in a life without biological children.¹ 

Obsession with bloodline is a means of control, often reducing children to pawns in an enduring agenda. In Vance’s system, households would receive additional votes for every child. As countless Threaders (Threadditers?) have pointed out, this would give a ridiculous amount of extra votes to families like the Duggars. But childless cat ladies are just the tip of this elegiac iceberg. This philosophy would inevitably spill out to others deemed less invested, less mature, less capable, less able, less rich, less white, less conservative, less, less, less. It does not matter that Vance said this three years ago. Even if his philosophy ebbs and changes with pushback or opportunity, he still holds views that swipe at equality, equity, and freedom.

Regardless of the state of our fertility or family size (thinking about my single friends who are often ignored in these sorts of conversations), we have a stake in this election, our country, and future because we are human. If we have any empathy at all, our stakes are high.

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For every childless woman, there’s a deeper story often tinged or shrouded by grief and loss. Always, women are criticized for leaving the house, having careers with children and pursuing careers without them. There’s an underlying message here: some men demand our silence and prefer our absence. Men will say “women will always be taken care of when they’re with men” and give us different menus² and different roles, bar us from voting, mock our family sizes, belittle our careers, patronize our questions and words, gaslight our testimonies, ridicule our dreams.³ 

I am angry because these words from a vice presidential candidate are maddening. No context makes them better. He spoke in purposeful generalizations to cast a wide net of condemnation upon childless women. So I will hold this anger. It’s the kind of anger that has staying power. “We need all our anger now.”⁴

1. It’s also important to note that Vice President Kamal Harris (whom Vance was referring to in his video about “childless cat ladies”) is not even childless. She is a stepmother to two children, making her a mother in so many ways even if not biologically.

2. Geraldine DeRuiter tells a story in her memoir about restaurants that give menus with prices to the men and different menus without prices to the women because of the implication that “women will always be taken care of when they’re with men,” which is definitely not true and absolutely offensive.

3. I think it’s clear but just in case it’s not, I certainly do not mean all men. I know many good men. I am married to one. But the men who hold power, the ones who double down and seek to limit freedom, control bodies, denounce personhood, are the ones I’m talking about here. Not all men, but still far too many.

4. This is a quote from Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time and Mrs. Whatsit’s powerful words on anger to “Little Meg.”