By the close of his second week as Donald Trump’s running mate, Senator J. D. Vance’s 2021 comments about the “childless cat ladies” allegedly leading the Democratic Party had entwined themselves around him, like hungry felines harking to a can opener. Vance, in an interview with Tucker Carlson during the 2022 Senate campaign, had dissed Democrats who hadn’t reproduced, citing Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as examples, on national television. On July 26th of this year, in an interview with Megyn Kelly, Vance said that all the flak he’d been taking for his remarks was unfair. He had “nothing against cats,” he emphasized. He blamed the media for reporting what he’d said three years ago. He did not apologize to Harris, whose stepdaughter and her mother had rushed to the defense of their blended family, or to Buttigieg, who, with his husband, Chasten, had been in the process of adopting in 2021 and now has twins. (Perhaps these are simply not the sorts of families that count from Vance’s perspective.) Vance told Kelly that he had not been “criticizing people who for various reasons didn’t have kids”—although he had described them as “miserable at their own lives and the choices they’ve made” and wanting “to make the rest of the country miserable, too.” He’d been “criticizing the Democratic Party for becoming anti-family and anti-child.”

What qualifies for Vance’s party as pro-family and pro-child? Not the policies that Democrats advocate for—and that the majority of Americans back—which support existing families. Not paid parental leave guaranteed by the federal government, which the United States almost alone among wealthy countries still lacks. Not universal preschool. Not an extension of the expanded child-tax credit that lifted millions of children out of poverty during the pandemic. Not, of course, access to contraception and abortion, though both allow many people to build the families they envision, at points in their lives when they are able to take care of children.

It would be more accurate to describe Vance’s pro-family views as pronatalist. He has said, for instance, that the votes of people with children should count for more than those of nonparents. His definition of a mother—given that he excluded Harris from the category—would seem to exclude those who have not given birth. And pronatalism, as it’s been developing lately in certain conservative circles, has much in common with some of his opinions. Pronatalism typically combines concerns about falling birth rates with........

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