The politics of motherhood become a campaign-trail cudgel

WASHINGTON — She is not humble. She has no stake in the future of the country. She and other childless women are looking down on Americans who have chosen to reproduce.

These are a few of the broadsides Republicans have lobbed against Vice President Kamala Harris, who has come under attack not for something she has done or said but for something she doesn’t have: biological children.

The latest jab came from Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders. This past week, she took the stage at a campaign event for former President Donald Trump and declared that her three children had given her the sort of humility that is important to maintain in national politics.

“My kids keep me humble,” she said to the crowd. “Unfortunately, Kamala Harris doesn’t have anything keeping her humble.”

Call it the motherhood divide. The presidential race has exposed a fault line in American culture — or at least among today’s most prominent politicians — over the deeply personal (and usually private) decision to have children. With an election likely to be decided by razor-thin margins, perhaps by women whose votes could tip the scale either way, motherhood itself has become a campaign-trail cudgel.

Conservatives are trying to appeal to voters who may see an existential value in motherhood. Prominent Republicans, including Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, Trump’s running mate, have tied their concerns about reproduction to the declining birthrate in the United States, disparaging childless women like Harris in the process.

“This is not about criticizing people who, for various reasons, didn’t have kids,” Vance said in an interview with commentator Megyn Kelly in July, addressing past comments he had made calling Harris and other top Democrats “childless cat ladies” without a direct stake in the country’s future. “This is about criticizing the Democratic Party for becoming anti-family and anti-child.”

Democrats report having fewer children than Republicans do. According to a 2022 survey by the University of Chicago, about 38% of Democrats had never had children as of that year, compared with 26% of Republicans.

A majority of American families are also considered nontraditional. More children are raised by remarried parents, single parents, cohabitating parents or no parents than by two parents in their first marriage.

Some Republican strategists do not see a winning strategy in broadsides against people who might not have children.

“When you attack anyone for their identity, you offend everyone who shares that identity,” said Whit Ayres, a longtime Republican pollster. “So if you attack people for being childless, you offend everyone who has never had children. For whatever reason.”

In the opposite corner, the left is trying to appeal to women who see motherhood as valuable — but still a choice.

Democrats have framed the decision not to have children as part of a set of choices that people should be able to make in private. And they have argued that many Americans are declining to have children because the government is not providing adequate services, like affordable child care and quality maternal health care.

In an appearance Thursday with Oprah Winfrey, Harris pointed to the story of Amber Thurman, a 28-year-old mother from Georgia who died after not receiving prompt treatment when she experienced complications from a medication abortion.

“It’s a health care crisis that affects the patient and the profession,” Harris said, blaming abortion restrictions enacted after the fall of Roe v. Wade in 2022 — a development that Trump has celebrated.

Harris has not directly responded to Republicans who have accused her of not caring about families because she does not have biological children of her own. Members of her blended family are doing the work for her.

“It’s appalling for somebody who is in a position of leadership, like governor, to say something so repulsive and so out of touch,” Doug Emhoff, Harris’ husband and the father of the vice president’s two stepchildren, Cole and Ella, said in an ABC News interview.

Emhoff’s ex-wife, Kerstin Emhoff, also responded to Sanders on social media: “Kamala Harris has spent her entire career working for the people, ALL families,” she wrote. “That keeps you pretty humble.”

Anya Jabour, a professor of history at the University of Montana who studies gender and politics, said reproductive status had long been used to minimize women in politics.

She said that “cat lady” was an old trope: Opponents of the American suffrage movement used cats to symbolize femininity, and depicted men as stuck at home with the animals should women win the right to vote.

Jabour said that there was a “long history of a false dichotomy between feminism and maternalism,” or people whose ideas of identity revolve around motherhood.

She added that cases like Thurman’s in Georgia showed that “in fact, reproductive rights and mothers’ interests are very closely intertwined.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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