On Cat Ladies and Fertility Rates
My message to J.D. Vance: Your thinking is sound, but your plan is woefully inadequate. Go big, or go home.
“Some years ago, my colleagues and I put forth the low fertility trap hypothesis. We argued that once fertility stays low for a prolonged period, a series of mutually-reinforcing mechanisms make it ever less likely that birth rates will increase again in future.” —Norwegian demographer Vegard Skirbekk (2022)
In July 2021, J.D. Vance inaugurated his (successful) run for Senator of Ohio by delivering a speech to a conservative student group, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, on declining birth rates. In the speech, Vance said that he wished to see the GOP become a pro-family party and that he wanted “to take aim at the left, specifically the childless left,” for their “rejection of the American family” and their neglect of “policies that would strengthen the family.” He added that it was probably no accident that so many of the rising leaders of the Democratic Party—here he mentioned Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, Cory Booker, and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez—were themselves childless. Conceding that some people cannot have children and that his comments were not directed at them, Vance nonetheless suggested that the raising of children was conspicuously absent from the progressives’ vision of the good life.
A few days later, on Tucker Carlson’s Fox show, Vance recapitulated his argument with a bit more edge: “The entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children.” He then went on: “We’re effectively run in this country… by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable about their own lives and who want to make the rest of the country miserable too.”
After the Harris oppo research team discovered and pulled this segment three weeks ago, the Harris campaign naturally broadcasted it, triggering a hue and cry among Democratic politicians like Hillary Clinton and celebrities like Jennifer Aniston and Whoopi Goldberg. Vance’s comments, they charged, reveal how the GOP wants to blame us, control our bodies, and invade our private lives. Even European progressives were outraged. Indeed, several conservative pundits questioned Vance’s sanity. “You want me to pay more taxes to take care of other people's kids?” replied Dave Portnoy (leader of the very Trumpian “barstool Republicans”). “We sure this dude is a Republican? Sounds like a moron. If you can't afford a big family don't have a ton of kids.”
Vance has appeared on Megyn Kelly and other shows to walk back his comments—a bit. He admits that his comments were “sarcastic” (not to say snide and snarky and, well, catty) and that he did not intend to criticize individuals. But he has doubled down on his overall argument: that falling fertility is a serious national challenge and that Republicans, in their policy views and their family behavior, are doing a lot more to meet this challenge than Democrats. What he wants is for Republicans to adopt, and run on, an explicitly family-friendly national agenda.
On the gap between Republicans and Democrats in their views and behavior, Vance is largely correct: Redzone and bluezone voters do show a clear divide in how many children they have, in their views about family life, and (yes) even in their ownership of cats. I’ll come back to these numbers later on. Before I get there, let me address a few other questions.
Fertility Decline… What Me Worry?
We might ask, for starters, whether Vance is right to worry about fertility decline. Well, I think so. In 2023, the US total fertility rate weighed in at 1.62, which is 23% below the replacement rate. If our TFR continues to fall at the same rate that it has since the GFC (2007)—that is, if we join in the decline that now seems to be prevalent in most of the rest of the high-income and emerging-market world—it would hit 1.25 a decade from now, in 2033. That would be not much higher than where China is today, and China (according to the UN’s constant-fertility population projection) is on track to lose 75% of its working-age population between now and the end of this century.