Childless Adults and Stepparents Have Some Thoughts on JD Vance

Published By: Mother Jones. Read the full article.

In the 1960s and 70s, Jane Goodman recalls dealing with systemic misogyny. Women were not able to get credit cards in their own names until 1974, for example. Now 78, Goodman, a former actress and government worker, also remembers accompanying her roommate for an “illegal abortion in a hotel room” in New York City during her sophomore year at Connecticut College for Women, before the constitutional right to an abortion was established via Roe v. Wade in 1973. “That was a chilling nightmare,” she says.

What Goodman does not recall are any disparaging comments on her status as a childless woman, even though she remained so until she had a child at age 40, during a period when the average age of becoming a mother was 21. “Nobody thought that I was not fulfilling my destiny or duty to society because I was being productive,” she says. “I had gone to college. I was using my degree. I got jobs, I paid taxes.”

Today, decades later, similarly situated women have recently faced a deluge of judgment triggered by former president Donald Trump’s vice presidential pick, Ohio Sen. JD Vance. Unsurprisingly, Vance has repeatedly criticized liberals, but one particular and controversial target of his contempt are women—including presumed Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris—who do not have biological kids.

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