Vance Denigrated Harris for Being Childless. Her Blended Family Is Defending Her.

WASHINGTON — In a 2021 interview with Fox News, JD Vance lamented that the United States was being run by “childless cat ladies” like Vice President Kamala Harris, women who he claimed had no “direct stake” in the country’s future.

This week, Harris received a powerful gesture of support from one of her biggest advocates: the mother of her stepchildren.

“For over 10 years, since Cole and Ella were teenagers, Kamala has been a co-parent with Doug and I,” Kerstin Emhoff said in a statement released by the office of the second gentleman, Doug Emhoff. “She is loving, nurturing, fiercely protective and always present. I love our blended family and am grateful to have her in it.”

On Thursday morning, Ella Emhoff chimed in as well: “How can you be ‘childless’ when you have cutie pie kids like Cole and I,” she wrote on Instagram, urging her mother to “say it louder for the people in the back.”

Although the comments by Vance are several years old, dating to when he was running for the Senate, they are landing differently in a new political climate.

Vance is now former President Donald Trump’s running mate, and his words have resurfaced at a moment when many women, in polls and at the ballot box, are defending their right to make their own choices — about abortion, birth control, access to fertility services or not having children at all.

In the Fox interview, Vance said Harris and other Democrats, including Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, “don’t really have a direct stake” in the future because they are “people without children.” (Buttigieg and his husband, Chasten Buttigieg, welcomed twins in August 2021.)

Vance said the country is run by “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made.”

The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment on the remarks, which reemerged earlier this week. But Vance’s sister, Lindsay Lewis, called the criticism a machination of the media and the Democratic Party.

“JD was raised by some of the strongest women I know and went on to marry an incredibly strong woman in Usha,” Lewis said in a statement sent through her brother’s office. “JD is a testament to the women in his life, and the attacks from the media and Democrats that assume anything otherwise is vile.”

Harris married Doug Emhoff in 2014, when Cole and Ella were teenagers. Harris, whose parents had filed for divorce by the time she was 8, wrote in Elle magazine in 2019 that she was initially wary of being a “temporary fixture” in the children’s lives.

She said they built the relationship over time. “I was already hooked on Doug, but I believe it was Cole and Ella who reeled me in,” she wrote. Years later, the trio decided on a name for Harris that sounded warmer than the term “stepmom.” They came up with “Momala.”

Sen. Maggie Hassan, D-N.H., who gave advice to Harris on balancing work and parenting when the vice president was a senator, called Vance’s comments “inane” and “insidious.”

“Vice President Harris’ children already know how strong, warm, loving and talented she is,” Hassan said.

The outrage over Vance’s remarks has been bipartisan.

“I’ve followed JD Vance’s evolution over the last few years and knew of the comment and was repulsed by it then and now,” said Alyssa Farah Griffin, a former Republican strategist and Trump administration official who now co-hosts “The View.” “But so many women in my life — left, right, and center — are just discovering it and couldn’t be more turned off. To suggest women without kids have less value in society is offensive.”

Meghan McCain, a conservative commentator and the daughter of Sen. John McCain, wrote on social media that Vance’s comments would have a ripple effect, angering families who have had to turn to fertility procedures to have children — or people who don’t want their reproductive status commented on or judged at all.

“I have been trying to warn every conservative man I know,” she said. “These JD comments are activating women across all sides, including my most conservative Trump-supporting friends. These comments have caused real pain and are just innately un-Christian. This is not who we are.”

Reproductive rights have fueled Democratic victories across the country in the nearly two years since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, which guaranteed a constitutional right to abortion.

Harris has emerged as the most outspoken defender of abortion rights in the Biden administration, while Vance, who has described himself as “100% pro-life,” has supported a federal abortion ban and opposed exceptions for rape and incest.

Now, as a vice presidential candidate, Vance has tried to modify his past views.

“You have to believe in reasonable exceptions because that’s where the American people are,” Vance told Fox News this week. Americans say at record levels that they support at least some access to abortion.

Harris and other Democrats have said the Supreme Court’s repeal of Roe v. Wade had consequences that could also affect access to fertility treatments like in vitro fertilization.

Earlier this year in Alabama, the state’s Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos could be considered “extrauterine children” under state law, prompting several fertility clinics in the state to suspend IVF treatments. The governor had to sign an emergency order protecting the practice.

Vance signed onto a letter in June supporting access to in vitro fertilization.

On Thursday afternoon, the Harris campaign sent an email to supporters, wishing a “Happy World IVF Day to Everyone Except JD Vance.”

According to Centers for Disease Control data on fertility clinic success rates, in 2021 there were about 167,689 egg or embryo-banking cycles performed in which all the eggs or embryos were frozen for future use. Approximately 2.3% of all infants born in the United States every year are conceived using assisted reproductive technology.

Farah Griffin said that questioning women’s choices about motherhood is a losing political strategy.

“If I were the Harris campaign,” Farah Griffin said. “I would air that clip in suburban media markets in swing states from now until Election Day.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .