JD Vance’s comments, Trump’s pick for Vice President of the United States, about Kamala Harris didn’t just come out of nowhere. They reflect conservative beliefs present in societies that consider themselves modern.
A woman without biological children is running for the highest office in the United States, and „naturally,” this quality will be used against her, writes journalist Nesrine Malik in an opinion piece published in The Guardian.
In the short period since launching her candidacy for the Democratic Party's nomination for President of the United States, Kamala Harris has been scrutinized and re-scrutinized on this considered vulnerable point - the lack of children. Conservative lawyer Will Chamberlain wrote on X that Harris should not be president because "it's not her skin in the game." Republican candidate for Vice President of the United States, JD Vance, referred to Harris and other Democratic politicians as "a bunch of childless ladies with cats, tired of their lives".
In other comments, Vance said that "many of the left-wing leaders, and I hate that I have to get so personal about this, but they are childless people trying to brainwash our children, which baffles and displeases me." Trump's man has become so obsessed with this issue that it reveals the existence of a complex, notes the author.
It's a very virulent trend in the United States, where there is a right-wing movement that has made a fixation on female reproduction, but this is not only manifested across the ocean. Andrea Leadsom, former Economic Secretary to the Treasury of the United Kingdom, said during the Conservative Party leadership elections: "I have children who will have children... who will be part of what is to come. I truly feel that being a mother means you have a real stake in the country's future, a tangible stake."
It's evidence of the visceral repulsion of politics towards the idea that a childless woman should have credibility, a status.
A childless woman is less vulnerable
We are dealing with a persistent political trend that questions, in subtle or explicit ways, women without children, especially those who dare to advance on the public stage or in the professional sphere. And every time such an issue reaches the public space, women are taken aback and want to be left alone, not to be meticulously examined about how they came to the decision not to have children or why they are content not to.
Behind these opinions lies the old-fashioned inability to conceive of women outside of motherhood. But one of the reasons why this traditionalism persists in apparently modern and progressive areas is that women give up motherhood in capitalist societies, with limited support for parents, raising questions about their unfair and unrecognized economic conditions.
A woman without children is less likely to be trapped in the domestic sphere and to extend her caregiving work to elderly relatives or other people's children. She cannot be a resource to support a man's career, vulnerabilities, time constraints, and social demands, the author emphasizes.
The absence of motherhood creates a void for that "free" service on which societies increasingly fixated on nuclear families and poorly subsidized rights depend. In other words, motherhood becomes an economic addition, a public good, something that is talked about as if women themselves were not present. Data on declining birth rates draw comments like those of Elon Musk who wrote that it is "extremely worrying!!" echoing Vance's remarks about Kamala Harris.
A colossal unjust social contract
Not having children is reduced, in the opinion of some politicians, to entirely personal motivations - selfishness, delusion with the false promise of freedom, lack of values and foresight, irresponsibility - rather than external conditions: the need for affordable childcare, support networks, flexible work contracts, and the financial risks that motherhood frequently entails, creating a dependency on partners. These are material issues that need to be considered before entering a state from which there is no turning back: having a child.
It's a dual public discourse that conceals the fact that many women have had pregnancies and abortions, spontaneous or not. Some extend motherhood to various children in their lives and, like Kamala Harris, have stepchildren. Some have become mothers, but not in a way that makes them happy and they experience regrets and depression.
Moreover, women have to deal with everything that motherhood entails, with all its deeply personal, astonishing, isolating, and unrecognized realities, while being subjected to ruthless public theories and notions that suffocate them.
Women with children are granted social acceptance for their vital investment in the "future," in exchange for unpaid and unsupported work that sustains and stabilizes the economic and social status quo.
More and more women are starting to reject this colossal unjust social contract. This is not to the liking of politicians with a rigid mindset, as they seek to perpetuate the current social order in which a childless woman is considered a disturbing oddity, even dangerous.
T.D.