Jennifer Aniston Criticizes JD Vance ‘Childless Cat Lady’ Comments: ‘I Can’t Believe This’
Jennifer Aniston “truly can’t believe” Sen. J.D. Vance’s comments about people who don’t have children. The Friends actress, 55, took to Instagram to react to Vance’s resurfaced comments about “childless cat ladies” from 2021. On her Instagram Story, she shared an X post from MeidasTouch.com Editor-in-Chief Ron Filipkowski. In the X post, Filipkowski shared a clip from when Vance appeared on Fox News’ Tucker Carlson Tonight in 2021.
“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,” Filipkowski wrote in the post that Aniston shared to her story.
Aniston wrote her own response to the X post, saying that she “truly can’t believe this is coming from a potential VP of The United States.”
“All I can say is… Mr. Vance, I pray that your daughter is fortunate enough to bear children of her own one day,” she continued.
Aniston also wrote about IVF, as she previously opened up about using IVF when trying to get pregnant.
“I hope she will not need to turn to IVF as a second option,” Aniston continued in her message for Vance. “Because you are trying to take that away from her, too.”
In a 2022 interview with Allure, Aniston opened up about the struggles she faced when she was trying to get pregnant. “I would say my late 30s, 40s, I’d gone through really hard s—, and if it wasn’t for going through that, I would’ve never become who I was meant to be,” she said at the time, adding that she “was trying to get pregnant.”
“It was a challenging road for me, the baby-making road,” she continued. ““All the years and years and years of speculation … It was really hard.”
While Aniston “was going through IVF, drinking Chinese teas, you name it” and “throwing everything at it,” she had to deal with people making assumptions about why she wasn’t having kids.
Some people thought she was “just selfish,” she told the outlet. People started spreading rumors about how she only cared about her career or how her husband supposedly left her because she “wouldn’t give him a kid.”
She called these “absolute lies,” though “God forbid a woman is successful and doesn’t have a child.”
In 2016, Aniston wrote an essay for HuffPost about how she wasn’t pregnant.
“If I am some kind of symbol to some people out there, then clearly I am an example of the lens through which we, as a society, view our mothers, daughters, sisters, wives, female friends and colleagues,” she wrote at the time, in response to people speculating about whether or not she was pregnant. “The objectification and scrutiny we put women through is absurd and disturbing.”
In the essay, she drew attention to how we as a society “define a woman’s value based on her marital and maternal status.”
“The sheer amount of resources being spent right now by press trying to simply uncover whether or not I am pregnant (for the bajillionth time … but who’s counting) points to the perpetuation of this notion that women are somehow incomplete, unsuccessful, or unhappy if they’re not married with children,” she continued.
In a resurfaced video from July 2021, Vance made comments implying that Kamala Harris is a “childless cat lady” because she hasn’t given birth to children (Harris is a stepmom to two children).
“We’re effectively run in this country, via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs, 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,” Vance said at the time.
“It’s just a basic fact: You look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC, the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children,” he continued. “And how does it make any sense that we’ve turned our country over to people that don’t have a direct stake in it.”
At the time he made the comments, Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg and his husband were navigating their adoption journey, and he adopted his children shortly after Vance made the comments.