Jennifer Aniston is lashing out at Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance for referring to women without children as “childless cat ladies.”
When Vance was a candidate for the Ohio Senate back in 2021, he told then-Fox News host Tucker Carlson that the United States 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.”
“JD Vance says women who haven’t given birth like Kamala Harris are ‘childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives,’ and have ‘no direct stake’ in America,” Ron Filipkowski, editor-in-chief of the MeidasTouch Network, wrote alongside a 28-second clip he shared to X.
In the resurfaced interview, which started making the rounds again on social media this week after Filipkowski’s post went viral, Vance said, “It’s just a basic fact — you look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) — the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children. And how does it make any sense that we’ve turned our country over to people who don’t really have a direct stake in it?”
Harris is a stepmom to her husband Doug Emhoff’s two adult children. Vance and his wife Usha have three kids, sons Ewan, 6 and Vivek, 4, and daughter Mirabel, 2.
As a senator, Vance voted against the Right to IVF Act, which seeks to protect access to affordable in vitro fertilization (IVF) services across America.
Aniston, 55, who has spoken out in the past about her own fertility struggles, blasted Vance’s cutting remarks in a post to her Instagram Story.
“All I can say is … Mr. Vance, I pray that your daughter is fortunate enough to bear children of her own one day,” Aniston wrote. “I hope she will not need to turn to IVF as a second option. Because you are trying to take that away from her, too.”
Back in 2022, Aniston opened up about the hurdles she tried to overcome to have a child and her experience with IVF.
The Friends star didn’t say when she tried to conceive, but told Allure that she had “zero regrets” about how her life has turned out.
“I was trying to get pregnant. It was a challenging road for me, the baby-making road,” she said of life in her 30s. “I was going through IVF, drinking Chinese teas, you name it. I was throwing everything at it. I would have given anything if someone had said to me, ‘Freeze your eggs. Do yourself a favour.’ You just don’t think it.”
Aniston also addressed speculation that she chose her acting over having kids with her first husband Brad Pitt, to whom she was married for five years.
“It was absolute lies,” said Aniston of the rumours that she just cared about her career. “God forbid a woman is successful and doesn’t have a child. And the reason my husband left me, why we broke up and ended our marriage, was because I wouldn’t give him a kid.”
In the years following her split from Pitt, Aniston dated Vince Vaughn and John Mayer, before wedding Justin Theroux in 2015. Following their divorce in 2018, Aniston said it is unlikely she will marry again.
“Never say never, but I don’t have any interest,” she said. “I’d love a relationship. Who knows? There are moments I want to just crawl up in a ball and say, ‘I need support.’ It would be wonderful to come home and fall into somebody’s arms and say, ‘That was a tough day.’”
But the Emmy-winning actress said she was comfortable with how her life has unfolded and wasn’t stuck living in the past.
“Here I am today. The ship has sailed,” she said. “I actually feel a little relief now because there is no more, ‘Can I?’ I don’t have to think about that anymore.”
Prior to her interview with Allure, Aniston penned an essay for the Huffington Post about being the subject of constant pregnancy rumours.
“Here’s where I come out on this topic: We are complete with or without a mate, with or without a child. We get to decide for ourselves what is beautiful when it comes to our bodies. That decision is ours and ours alone,” Aniston wrote. “Let’s make that decision for ourselves and for the young women in this world who look to us as examples. Let’s make that decision consciously, outside of the tabloid noise. We don’t need to be married or mothers to be complete. We get to determine our own ‘happily ever after’ for ourselves.”