Jennifer Aniston at the Screen Actors Guild Awards on Saturday, Feb. 24, 2024 at The Shrine Auditorium and Expo Hall in Los Angeles. Photo: Robert Hanashiro / USA TODAY NETWORK
Jennifer Aniston had some strong words this week for former President and current Republican nominee Donald Trump’s running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH).
Like so many in the U.S., the Friends star was apparently shocked by Vance’s wildly misogynist comments belittling several prominent Democrats, including current Vice President and presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris, as “childless cat ladies,” which recently resurfaced on social media.
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On Wednesday, Aniston took to Instagram, re-posting a clip from Vance’s July 29, 2021, appearance on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show.
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“We’re effectively run in this country, via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs, by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too,” Vance told Carlson in the clip. “And it’s just a basic fact. You look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC, the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children. And how does it make any sense that we’ve turned our country over to people who don’t really have a direct stake in it?”
One could reasonably chalk Vance’s assumption that Buttigieg couldn’t or wouldn’t have children up to homophobic ignorance, but his presumption about then-31-year-old Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) was just categorically asinine.
Aniston seemed to agree.
“I truly can’t believe this is coming from a potential VP of The United States,” Aniston commented in her Instagram story. “All I can say is… Mr. Vance, I pray that your daughter is fortunate enough to bear children of her own one day. I hope she will not need to turn to IVF as a second option. Because you are trying to take that away from her, too.”
The issue is personal for Aniston, who after years of tabloid speculation about her struggle to have children, opened up to Allure about her journey with IVF.
“It was a challenging road for me, the baby-making road,” she told the magazine in 2022. “All the years and years and years of speculation… It was really hard. I was going through IVF, drinking Chinese teas, you name it. I was throwing everything at it. I would’ve given anything if someone had said to me, ‘Freeze your eggs. Do yourself a favor.’ You just don’t think it. So here I am today. The ship has sailed.”
“I have zero regrets,” she added. “I actually feel a little relief now because there is no more, ‘Can I? Maybe. Maybe. Maybe.’ I don’t have to think about that anymore.”
Vance’s opposition to a nationwide right to IVF doesn’t just affect cisgender women and others who can carry children. IVF is the most common method of assisted reproduction and, according to Dr. Eve Feinberg, associate professor of reproductive endocrinology and infertility at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, the most successful. Many LGBTQ+ couples turn to the treatment to have children, and as Feinberg recently noted, restricting access to IVF would cut off a route to parenthood for people of all genders.
The irony, of course, is that while Vance seems fine with making it more difficult for some Americans to become parents, he also wants to privilege parenthood in unprecedented ways. Not only do his 2021 comments seem to imply that he believes that not having children disqualifies people — specifically women and LGBTQ+ people, Vance neglected to mention childless Republican men like Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) — from holding elected office or government leadership positions, he has also suggested that parents should have more voting power than non-parents. As The New Yorker‘s Jessica Winter noted this week, during a 2021 speech, Vance said, “When you go to the 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.”
