J.D. Vance fired back at Jennifer Aniston for mentioning the Republican vice-presidential candidate’s daughter while slamming him for saying “childless cat ladies” are running the country.
In a resurfaced clip from his 2021 appearance on the now-defunct Fox News show Tucker Carlson Tonight, Vance complained 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,” adding, “and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.”
Aniston was not pleased and slammed Vance in her Instagram Stories last week, writing, “I truly can’t believe this is coming from a potential VP of the United States.”
She continued: “All I can say is … Mr. Vance, I pray that your daughter is fortunate enough to bear children of her own one day. 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.”
In response, Vance told Megyn Kelly on her SiriusXM show Friday that his words were taken out of context and he was not criticizing women with fertility issues but, rather, arguing that Democrats were “anti-family.”
He told Kelly, “You’ve got Hollywood celebrities saying, ‘Oh, well, J.D. Vance, what if your daughter suffered fertility problems?’
“Well, first of all, that’s disgusting because my daughter is two years old,” he said. “And second of all, if she had fertility problems, as I said in that speech, I would try everything I could to try to help her because I believe families and babies are a good thing.”
Like Aniston, Chelsea Handler also slammed Vance for his “cat lady” comments.
Handler called him a “wingnut elegy” before adding, “All of us childless cat and dog ladies are gonna go from childless and crushing it to childless and crushing you in November.”
In his initial 2021 comments, Vance condemned three childless politicians, saying, “It’s just a basic fact — you look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC (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?”
Buttigieg and his husband welcomed twins about a month after Vance’s comments while Harris shares two stepchildren with husband Doug Emhoff from his previous marriage to Kerstin Emhoff.
Harris’ stepdaughter Ella Emhoff took to her Instagram Stories amid the recent drama, NBC News reported, asking, “How can you be ‘childless’ when you have cutie-pie kids like Cole and I?”
She added, “I love my three parents.”
In 2022, Aniston opened up about her fertility struggles, telling Allure magazine that she tried multiple times to get pregnant — during “all the years of (media) speculation.”
She said: “I was throwing everything at it. I would’ve given anything if someone had said to me, ‘Freeze your eggs. Do yourself a favour.’ You just don’t think it. So here I am today. The ship has sailed.”