The attacks on childless women by Republicans may lead to their downfall
Editor’s note: The following article is an op-ed, and the views expressed are the author’s own. Read more opinions on theGrio.
Like Vice President Kamala Harris and millions of women, I’ve never given birth to a child. But contrary to the insulting views of Republican vice presidential nominee Sen. JD Vance and Arkansas Republican Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, this doesn’t make us inferior to biological mothers.
Sanders, who was then-President Donald Trump’s White House press secretary, criticized Harris last month by demeaning women who have not borne children. “My kids keep me humble,” Sanders said. “Unfortunately, Kamala Harris doesn’t have anything keeping her humble.”
Responding to Sanders, Harris said on an Oct. 6 podcast: “I don’t think she understands that there are a whole lot of women out here who, one, are not aspiring to be humble” and who have loving relationships with children despite never giving birth. “This is not the 1950s anymore.”
Sanders’s attack came on top of Vance’s criticism of Harris in 2021, when he called her one of “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too.” Vance said Harris and other Democratic “childless cat ladies” “don’t really have a direct stake” in the future because they are “people without children.”
Harris, who married for the first time 10 years ago at age 49, is the stepmother to her husband Doug Emhoff’s children Cole and Ella. Harris is also an aunt to her sister Maya’s daughter Meena and a great-aunt to Meena’s two daughters, Amara and Leela. I’ve known Harris since 2004 and count her as a friend. I know from talking with her over the years that she loves all these children and has invested time and energy in their upbringing.
Doug Emhoff’s first wife, Kerstin Emhoff, the biological mother of the two Emhoff children, said in July that Vance’s criticism of Harris for not being a biological mother was “baseless” and added: “For over 10 years, since Cole and Ella were teenagers, Kamala has been a co-parent with Doug and I. She is loving, nurturing, fiercely protective, and always present. I love our blended family and am grateful to have her in it.”
Most importantly for voters, Harris is proposing policies in her Democratic presidential campaign to benefit children and families, unlike GOP presidential candidate Trump and Vance. These Harris policies include limiting child-care costs for low-income working families to 7% of family income and giving families child tax credits of $6,000 for newborns, $3,600 for children under age 6 and $3,000 for older children.
In a nonsensical answer to a question last month, Trump falsely stated that child care is “not very expensive” and would be made more affordable by his plan to slap tariffs on imported goods that experts estimate would cost the average family $2,600 to $4,000 a year, or maybe more.
And Vance lamely suggested in September that grandparents should provide child care, as if all grandparents are retired, in good health, live near their children and grandchildren, and have nothing else to do.
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In addition, Harris supports increased funding for schools and colleges, and an opportunity economy that would help more Americans work their way into the middle class and higher. Trump has said he wants to eliminate the U.S. Department of Education.
The fact that Trump and Vance are biological fathers is irrelevant to the fact that many policies they advocate would harm parents struggling to meet the costs of raising their kids.
As a “childless dog lady,” I know that women like me who aren’t biological mothers aren’t abnormal, unfulfilled, cold-hearted, hostile to children and unconcerned with building a better future for the next generation. We shouldn’t be treated like second-class citizens, as if bearing children was the sole purpose of a woman’s existence and the only measure of her worth. Women are not brood mares.
In 2020, just under half of all American women had never given birth. Among women 45 to 50, at the end of their reproductive years, about 15% had never had babies. The U.S. fertility rate is at a historic low and a Pew Research Center poll published in July found that it may drop even lower because 57% of U.S. adults under 50 said they are unlikely to ever have children.
Some women who want children can’t get pregnant, some worry they can’t afford the cost of raising children, some want to focus on their careers and some single women don’t want children without a partner. Some adopt children and some, like Harris, become stepmothers.
If a woman wants to have many children, more power to her. My mother had nine kids and as the third-oldest, I helped raise my younger siblings. But if a woman takes a different path as I did and doesn’t have biological children, she shouldn’t be stigmatized.
Children and young adults have long been an important part of my life, from my brothers and sisters to my nieces and nephews, to students I’ve taught at colleges, to serving as chair of the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board, to mentoring interns and other young people. I’ve even used my savings to provide scholarship assistance to college students.
So while I don’t have the stretch marks of a woman who has given birth, I’ve stretched myself to help more young people than I can count. This is one of my greatest satisfactions in life.
If being a biological parent was a necessary qualification to be president, five of the men who have held the office — including George Washington, often called “the father of our country” — would have been barred. Other presidents who never fathered biological children were James Madison, James Buchanan, James Polk and Andrew Jackson. I’ve never heard any of them called a “childless cat gentleman.”
Like Kamala Harris, Washington became a stepparent to two children when he married.
I realize that Trump, Vance and other Republicans are desperately looking for anything they can find to demean and insult Harris. But they should remember that more women than men vote. The ugly sexist smear campaign they are waging to prevent Harris from becoming America’s first woman president will hurt them more than her.
Donna Brazile is a veteran political strategist, Senior Advisor at Purple Strategies, New York Times bestselling author, Chair of the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board, and sought-after Emmy- and Peabody-award-winning media contributor to such outlets as ABC News, USA Today and TheGrio. She previously served as interim Chair of the Democratic National Committee and of the DNC’s Voting Rights Institute. Donna was the first Black American to serve as the manager of a major-party presidential campaign, running the campaign of Vice President Al Gore in 2000. She serves as an adjunct professor in the Women and Gender Studies Department at Georgetown University and served as the King Endowed Chair in Public Policy at Howard University and as a fellow at the Institute of Politics at Harvard Kennedy School. She has lectured at nearly 250 colleges and universities on diversity, equity and inclusion; women in leadership; and restoring civility in American politics.