Jennifer Aniston is taking aim at JD Vance, criticizing him for comments he made in the past about “childless cat ladies.”
The Morning Show star, who has been open about her struggles with fertility, put Donald Trump’s vice-presidential candidate in her crosshairs via Instagram after a resurfaced clip showed Vance slamming Democratic politicians who do not have biological 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, then a Senate candidate, told Tucker Carlson on his now-defunct Fox News show in 2021.
“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?” Vance continued at the time.
On Wednesday, 55-year-old Aniston took Vance to task for those comments, sharing her thoughts in her Instagram story with her nearly 45 million followers.
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“I truly can’t believe this is coming from a potential VP of The United States,” the Friends star wrote.
“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 (in vitro fertilization) as a second option. Because you are trying to take that away from her, too.”
Last month, Vance, along with other Senate Republicans, voted to block Democrat-proposed legislation to guarantee access to IVF nationwide. And during his Senate bid, he lent his support to the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade and for Texas’s ban on abortion.
In 2022, Aniston shared with Allure magazine that she tried to get pregnant for several years and underwent unsuccessful rounds of IVF.
“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,” she told the magazine, adding that years of speculation from the public and press made it that much more difficult.
“The ship has sailed.”
And it’s not just Aniston who is hitting back at Vance over his past judgments about childless adults – Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who was criticized by Vance in the clip, addressed the comments earlier this week, speaking about the twins he adopted in 2021 with his husband, Chasten.
“The really sad thing is he said that after Chasten and I had been through a fairly heartbreaking setback in our adoption journey,” Buttigieg told CNN’s The Source.
“He couldn’t have known that — but maybe that’s why you shouldn’t be talking about other people’s children.”
One of Harris’s stepchildren (she has two with husband Doug Emhoff) also blasted Vance on Instagram.
“How can you be ‘childless’ when you have cutie pie kids like cole and I?” Ella Emhoff, 25, wrote on her Instagram story Thursday, referring to her 29-year-old brother, Cole Emhoff.
She also shared a screenshotted quote from her mother, Kerstin Emhoff, in which she defended Harris against Vance’s controversial comments.
“For over 10 years, since Cole and Ella were teenagers, Kamala has been a co-parent with Doug and I,” Kerstin told CNN Wednesday, calling the Hillbilly Elegy author’s comments “baseless attacks” on Harris.
“She is loving, nurturing, fiercely protective and always present,” Kerstin continued. “I love our blended family and am grateful to have her in it.”