JD Vance Claps Back at Jennifer Aniston in Their Feud Over ‘Childless Cat Ladies’
After Jennifer Aniston called JD Vance out over his “childless cat ladies” comment, the Republican vice-presidential candidate has hit back, calling the Friends star’s rebuke “disgusting.”
The dispute started last week after social media rediscovered comments Vance made in 2021, in which he complained to Fox News that the United States was being run 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.”
He added: “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?”
(Harris has two stepchildren, and Buttigieg welcomed twins about a month after Vance made those comments, according to The New York Times.)
JD Vance says women who haven’t given birth like Kamala Harris are “childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives,” and have “no direct stake” in America. pic.twitter.com/3DJY3pQTGe
— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) July 22, 2024
Aniston, currently an Emmy nominee for her role on The Morning Show, reacted to Vance’s resurfaced comments in her Instagram Stories. “I truly can’t believe this is coming from a potential VP of the United States,” she wrote, per CNN. “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.”
(Aniston opened about her fertility struggles and her experience with IVF in a 2022 Allure interview.)
Jennifer Aniston (who is rarely political & has been open about her own fertility struggle) has slammed JD Vance for his “childless cat lady” remarks.
“Mr. Vance, I pray that your daughter is fortunate enough to bear children of her own one day,” Aniston wrote. pic.twitter.com/pOwn5Jm57A
— Elizabeth Wagmeister (@EWagmeister) July 25, 2024
On Megyn Kelly’s SiriusXM show on Friday, July 26, Vance expressed disgust at Aniston’s comments.
“You have Hollywood celebrities saying, ‘Oh, well, JD Vance, what if your daughter suffered fertility problems?’” he said. “Well, first of all, that’s disgusting because my daughter is 2 years old. And second of all, if she had fertility problems, as I said in that speech, I would try everything I could to try to help her because I believe families and babies are a good thing.”
Vance also claimed his “cat ladies” comment was taken out of context, that he said “explicitly” in his original that he wasn’t talking about people who couldn’t have children, and that he was “talking about people who have turned anti-child into the ethic of their entire party.”
The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board also railed against Vance’s “censorious views about women who don’t have children,” saying in an opinion that the Ohio senator’s “cat ladies” comment is “the sort of smart-aleck crack that gets laughs in certain right-wing male precincts … but it doesn’t play well with the millions of female voters, many of them Republican, who will decide the presidential race.”
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