Usha Vance says her husband’s childless cat women comment taken out of context

Usha Vance, wife of Sen. J.D. Vance, the running mate of former President Donald Trump, defended her husband’s comment about “childless cat ladies,” saying it was taken out of context.

“I took a moment to look and actually see what he had said and try to understand what the context was and all that, which is something that I really wish people would do a little bit more often,” Ms. Vance said in a “Fox & Friends” interview that aired Monday. “And the reality is he made a quip in service of making a point that he wanted to make that was substantive, and it had actual meaning.”

She said that she wishes people would “spend a lot less time just sort of going through this three-word phrase or that three-word phrase, because what he was really saying is that it can be really hard to be a parent in this country.

“And sometimes our policies are designed in a way that make it even harder. And we should be asking ourselves, why is that true? What is it about our leadership and the way that they think about the world that makes it so hard sometimes for parents and that’s the conversation that I really think that we should have. And I understand why he was saying that,” she said.

Mr. Vance, Ohio Republican, made a comment to then-Fox News host Tucker Carlson when he was an Ohio Senate candidate in 2021 about “childless cat ladies” running the United States.

“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 they want to make the rest of the country miserable,” Mr. Vance said.

“It’s just a basic fact — you look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, [Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez] — the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children,” he said. “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?”

Ms. Harris is a stepmother, and Mr. Buttigieg is the father of two adopted children.

Asked what she would say to women who were offended by her husband’s comments, Ms. Vance said he would “never, ever, ever want to say something to hurt someone who was trying to have a family who really, you know, was struggling with that.”

“It is challenging and never, ever anything that anyone would want to mock or make fun of. And I also understand there are a lot of other reasons why people may choose not to have families, and many of those reasons are very good,” she said. “I think what I would say is, let’s try to look at the real conversation that he’s trying to have and engage with it and understand.”

Mr. Vance himself has defended what he said, saying it was just a “sarcastic comment” and the media has just spun it to focus on the comment and not the meaning behind it.