How Does Usha Vance Keep a Straight Face?

5 of the Worst Things J.D. Vance has said about women’s rights.

If you have a minute - could you take this quick survey about how people consume news in the modern age? LINK . THANK YOU! IT’S A BIG HELP!

J.D. Vance is once again drawing the ire of women from all walks of life after a podcast interview resurfaced where the veep candidate appears to agree with the host that the purpose of post-menopausal women (“females”!) is to help raise their grandchildren.

As the wonderful Joyce Vance (no relation) writes on MSNBC:

In a viral thread on X, a remarkable collection of women demonstrated precisely why they are entitled to a respected place in society. The respondents included an operating room nurse, a city council member, a CEO of a landscape supply company, a CPA, and a legal assistant. Food pantry volunteers, political campaign volunteers, and yes, pet owners and caregivers all chimed in too. Elsewhere on the platform, “The Handmaid’s Tale” author Margaret Atwood did not mince words: “So, um, speaking as a very postmenopausal woman, if I didn’t have grandkids should I be taken out and shot? Lacking a sole purpose?”

The 2024 Democratic ticket is currently led by a postmenopausal woman and a running mate who earned the nickname “Tampon Tim” after signing a Minnesota bill that provided free period products in school restrooms. The 2024 Republican ticket, in contrast, is led by two men who have consistently mocked, denigrated and undermined female autonomy.

I hear on a daily basis from readers and followers who are confounded that J.D. Vance’s Yale graduate wife Usha Vance, a woman who seems like a reasonable person, can stomach his views on women. And I have to say, I could never. Because J.D. Vance’s views about how women should behave and live and simply exist in the world are weird and regressive. 

After these extremist quotes come to light, JD is very quick to gaslight us by employing the rhetoric of “family values” to justify his views that align with his deeply entrenched patriarchal and biblically conservative ideology. 

This isn’t merely a matter of advocating for “traditional” families—Vance’s stance permeates into various aspects of policy-making, often with significant implications for women’s rights, societal roles, and even the structure of democracy itself. His positions on issues like abortion, women’s roles in society, and child care reveal a broader agenda that seeks to preserve and reinforce a specific vision of family life—one that often marginalizes women and imposes a rigid, conservative framework on the lives of individuals. By cloaking these views in the language of “family values,” Vance appeals to a base that is nostalgic for a past where traditional roles were clear-cut, but he also risks alienating a society that is increasingly diverse in its understanding of family and gender roles. 

This framing allows him to push forward an agenda that not only seeks to curtail individual freedoms but also to reshape the very fabric of American society according to his conservative worldview.

He also has admitted that he pretends to hold more ‘moderate’ positions for political efficacy reasons, revealing that the extremist quotes likely more accurately reflect his political goals.  For example, after the abortion amendment passed in Ohio, he tweeted that Republicans need to bend their morals and pretend to support exceptions to abortion restrictions: “This is not about moral legitimacy but political reality. I've seen dozens of good polls on the abortion question in the last few months, many of them done in Ohio. Give people a choice between abortion restrictions very early in pregnancy with exceptions, or the pro choice position, and the pro life view has a fighting chance. “ twitter

ON ABORTION

Vance has expressed a desire to make abortion illegal nationwide, including in cases of rape and incest, which he referred to as "inconvenient" circumstances. Vance supports allowing law enforcement agencies access to women's abortion medical records.

"I think two wrongs don't make a right. ... It's not whether a woman should be forced to bring a child to term, it's whether a child should be allowed to live, even though the circumstances of that child's birth are somehow inconvenient or a problem to the society. The question really, to me, is about the baby." he said in a 2021 interview with Spectrum News,

“I certainly would like abortion to be illegal nationally,” Vance said in January 2022 on a podcast when running for Senate.

ON CHILDFREE INDIVIDUALS 

Vance has made disparaging remarks about people without children, particularly targeting women he described as "childless cat ladies." He suggested that childless individuals, especially those in leadership roles, are more sociopathic and contribute to societal instability. He has criticized female leaders without children, implying they lack a direct stake in the country and are less capable of making important decisions.

"We are effectively run in this country … by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they wanna make the rest of the country miserable, too."  2021, on Tucker Carlson Tonight

 "Why is this just a normal fact of … life, for the leaders of our country to be people who don’t have a personal and direct stake in it via their own offspring?" 2021 speech

ON WOMEN’S ROLES

In the 2020 interview where JD Vance agreed with a podcast host who suggested the purpose of post-menopausal women is to help with childcare he also suggested that women who work outside the home have been “had.”.

"If your worldview tells you that it’s bad for women to become mothers but liberating for them to work 90 hours a week in a cubicle at the New York Times or Goldman Sachs, you’ve been had" Twitter

ON UNIVERSAL DAYCARE

Vance has criticized universal daycare as undermining family values.

“Universal day care’ is class war against normal people,” he said on his own Twitter

“It turns out that normal Americans care more about their families than their jobs, and want a family policy that doesn’t shunt their kids into crap daycare so they can enjoy more ‘freedom’ in the paid labor force.” His own Twitter.

ON VIOLENT MARRIAGES

Vance suggested that not all violent marriages should end in divorce, criticizing the progressive viewpoint on domestic violence and emphasizing the negative effects of divorce on children. In his defense of his statement, he’s claimed that this is just about being pro-family, and that there is DV amongst unmarried partners. 

"This is one of the great tricks that I think the sexual revolution pulled on the American populace, which is the idea that like, 'Well, OK, these marriages were fundamentally, you know, they were maybe even violent, but certainly they were unhappy. And so getting rid of them and making it easier for people to shift spouses like they change their underwear, that's going to make people happier in the long term. … And maybe it worked out for the moms and dads, though I'm skeptical. But it really didn't work out for the kids of those marriages."  Pacifica Christian High School in Southern California in September 2021.

---

This is newsletter is 100% reader-supported. If you enjoy my writing or want to support my work, please consider upgrading. It’s about the cost of one coffee per month.