J.D. Vance’s Weird Thoughts on Older Women Exposed in New Audio

J.D. Vance’s views on gender and parenting have come back to haunt him, again.

In 2020, long before he entered politics, Vance appeared on a podcast where the host said that having grandmothers help raise children is “the whole purpose of the postmenopausal female.”

Vance agreed—and that wasn’t all of what was discussed on the episode.

The host also said that grandparents helping to raise children is a “weird, unadvertised feature of marrying an Indian woman,” and Vance again agreed, recounting how his mother-in-law, a biology professor in California, took a sabbatical from her job to help look after his newborn son.

“Painfully economically inefficient,” Vance said , making a larger point of what he saw as a societal problem. “Why didn’t she just keep her job, give us part of the wages to pay somebody else to do it, right? Because that is the thing that the hyper-liberalized economics wants you to do.”

The point that Vance seemed to be trying to make in 2020 was that this kind of economic thinking was at the root of today’s political problems. But it’s definitely strange to hear him agree that the entire purpose of a woman who is too old to bear children is to raise grandchildren. Not only is that offensive, but it’s also dismissive of other abilities or choices that women make.

The point about Indian culture is stranger still, as if Vance thinks his experience with his wife Usha’s parents represents all of Indian culture. It is true that intergenerational households are common in Indian culture, but the podcast’s tone coupled with Vance’s previous remarks (and proposed policies ) on women without children evoke a less than sincere interpretation.

Over the past few weeks, Vance has had to repeatedly explain and defend his comments about “childless cat ladies” made to Tucker Carlson in 2021. It seems this podcast will also have him on the defensive, as it again shows that he has some archaic views about family life.