She is not humble. She has no stake in the future of the country. She and other childless women look down on Americans who choose to procreate.
Here are some of the attacks Republicans have launched against Vice President Kamala Harris, who is being attacked not for anything she did or said, but for something she doesn’t have: biological children.
The latest came from Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders. Last week, she took the stage at a campaign event for former President Donald J. Trump and said her three children had given her the kind of humility that is important to maintain in national politics.
“My children humble me,” she told the crowd. “Unfortunately, Kamala Harris has nothing to humble her by.”
Let’s call it the motherhood divide. The presidential campaign has exposed a fault line in American culture—or at least among today’s most prominent politicians—around the deeply personal (and usually private) decision to have children. In an election that will likely be decided by razor-thin margins, perhaps by women whose votes could swing the issue one way or the other, motherhood itself has become a campaign issue.
Conservatives are trying to appeal to voters who see existential value in motherhood. Prominent Republicans, including Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio, Mr. Trump’s running mate, have linked their concerns about reproduction to the declining birth rate in the United States, denigrating childless women like Ms. Harris in the process.
“This is not about criticizing people who, for various reasons, have not had children,” Mr. Vance said in an interview with the commentator Megyn Kelly in July, responding to her past comments that he had referred to Ms. Harris and other Democrats as “childless ladies” with no vested interest in the future of the country. “This is about criticizing the Democratic Party for becoming anti-family and anti-child.”
Democrats report having fewer children than Republicans. According to a 2022 survey by the University of Chicago, about 38% of Democrats had never had children that year, compared with 26% of Republicans. But those numbers don’t support claims that the Democratic Party is dominated by people without children or families.
The majority of American families are also considered nontraditional. Children are more often raised by remarried parents, single parents, cohabiting parents, or no parents than by two parents from their first marriage.
Some Republican strategists see no winning strategy in attacking people who may not have children.
“When you attack someone because of their identity, you offend everyone who shares that identity,” said Whit Ayres, a longtime Republican pollster. “So if you attack people because they don’t have children, you offend everyone who never had children. Whatever the reason.”
In the opposite corner, the left is trying to appeal to women who see motherhood as something precious, but nonetheless a choice.
Democrats see the decision not to have children as part of a set of choices that people should be able to make privately. They argue that many Americans refuse to have children because the government fails to provide adequate services, such as affordable child care and quality maternal health care.
In an appearance Thursday with Oprah Winfrey, Harris spoke about the story of Amber Thurman, a 28-year-old mother from Georgia who died after not receiving prompt treatment after suffering complications from a medication abortion.
“This is a health care crisis that affects the patient and the profession,” Harris said, blaming abortion restrictions passed after Roe v. Wade was struck down in 2022 — a development Trump has welcomed.
Harris did not directly respond to Republicans who have accused her of not caring about families because she has no biological children. Members of her blended family do the work for her.
“It’s appalling for someone in a leadership position, like a governor, to say something that is so repugnant and so out of touch with reality,” Doug Emhoff, Harris’s husband and the father of the vice president’s two stepchildren, Cole and Ella, said in an interview with ABC News last week about Sanders’ comments. “Like you need to have your own biological children to be humble. But then, like women need to be humble,” he added.
Mr. Emhoff’s ex-wife, Kerstin Emhoff, also responded to Ms. Sanders on social media: “Kamala Harris has spent her entire career working for the people, ALL families,” she wrote. “That keeps you pretty humble.”
Anya Jabour, a history professor at the University of Montana who studies gender and politics, said reproductive status has long been used to minimize women’s place in politics.
She said the “cat lady” was an old cliché: Opponents of the American suffrage movement used cats to symbolize femininity and represented men stuck at home with the animals if women were given the vote.
Dr Jabour said there was a “long history of false dichotomy between feminism and motheralism”, that is, people whose ideas about identity revolve around motherhood.
She added that cases like Ms. Thurman’s in Georgia showed that “in fact, reproductive rights and the interests of mothers are very closely linked.”
