Republican Vice Presidential nominee J D Vance with former US President Donald Trump.
Credit: Reuters File Photo
Republican Vice Presidential nominee J D Vance recently went on the The Megyn Kelly Show to defend his comments calling Kamala Harris and some other Democratic Party members 'childless cat ladies' in a 2021 interview with Fox News.
His remarks were shared by the Harris team and has since then been criticised by many, including actor Jennifer Aniston.
Vance told the conservative media personality Megyn Kelly "Obviously it was a sarcastic comment. People are focusing so much on the sarcasm and not on the substance of what I actually said."
He insisted that he was not making the comments against people who do not have children due to medical or biological reasons but it is a criticism of the Democratic Party that has become "anti-family".
"This is about criticising the Democratic Party for becoming anti-family and anti-children," he told Kelly.
"The simple point that I made is that having children, becoming a father, becoming a mother, I really do think it changes your perspective in a pretty profound way," he said.
"I'm making an argument that our entire society has become sceptical and even hateful towards the idea of having kids."
"What our young moms and dads are telling us is that they don't feel comfortable in this society bringing new life into the world, that is a catastrophic problem," he said on low birth rates in the country.
In a 2021 interview with Tucker Carlson of Fox News, the Ohio senator had said that the country (US) was being run "by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they've made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too".
However, Kamala Harris is a stepmother to her husband Doug Emhoff’s two children. While Pete Buttigieg, who was also named by Mr Vance in the Fox news interview had later adopted twins with his husband, Chasten and recalled the adoption journey.
"The really sad thing is he said that after Chasten and I had been through a fairly heart-breaking setback in our adoption journey," Mr Buttigieg told CNN’s The Source programme.