“It’s possible,” writes Jessica Winter in the New Yorker, “that if JD Vance had his way, citizenship in the United States would be conferred not solely by birthright but by marriage and children.” This is no exaggeration. In a now viral 2021 clip, JD Vance said: “Let’s give votes to all children in this country, but let’s give control over those votes to the parents of those children. When you go to the polls in this country as a parent, you should have more power – you should have more of an ability to speak your voice in our democratic republic – than people who don’t have kids. Let’s face the consequences and the reality: If you don’t have as much of an investment in the future of this country, maybe you shouldn’t get nearly the same voice.”
This position now represents large swaths of the Republican party, which has taken on an angry and aggressively prescriptive approach to family life.
If you’re a woman in America, Republicans want you to be a mother whether you care to or not. They want you to risk your health to give them more babies. Then, when those babies get bigger, they want to make sure that those children’s fathers – or, excuse me, “parents” – have a near-total control over both them and you.
They don’t want you to be able to get a divorce if your marriage turns unhappy or even abusive. They don’t want your daughter to be able to get birth control if her father doesn’t approve of it; they don’t want your other daughter to be able to get the hormone treatment she needs to thrive as her truest self. They want to inspect your kids’ genitals before they let them play on the high school softball team. They want to ban books, and decide what your kids can and can’t read.
They want to bar the medical treatments that allow you to plan your family and have children on your own terms – things like egg freezing and IVF. They want to make you have your children young, and they want to stigmatize those of us women who pursue our own careers, interests and ambitions instead of popping out as many children as they deem appropriate.
If you say no – if you resist their prescription for marriage, motherhood and perpetual feminine self-sacrifice – they want to let you know, in sneeringly condescending terms, that you’re “childless cat ladies”, that you’re not as good as them, that step-parents are not real parents, blended families are not real families, that women who don’t have children are disgusting, worthless and deserving of contempt. If you say no, they want to denigrate you in public, punish you financially, dilute your vote and lessen your citizenship.
As the 2024 presidential election heats up following Trump’s selection of JD Vance as his running mate and Kamala Harris’s emergence as the new Democratic standard-bearer, it is becoming clear that much of the stakes of the November contest will revolve around questions of gender – and specifically, questions of family. And the view of the family that is emerging from the Republicans is a dark one indeed.
Because the version of “family” that the Republicans are putting forward is one that can only look a very particular way. In their eyes, family is a compulsory relation of domination, an institution in which marriage and parenthood function to grant men near-total private control over women and children. Women, meanwhile, face a grim fate in the Republicans’ preferred vision of family: they are forced into motherhood, trapped into marriage, and punished for resistance.
It’s not just that Vance, the VP pick and heir presumptive to the post-Trump Republican party, has made repeated, creepy remarks disparaging childless women and suggesting that adults without children should pay higher taxes and receive fewer votes. It’s that Vance’s obsessive, invasive and prurient investment in other people’s sexual and reproductive lives is the logical conclusion of the Republican party’s gender politics.
Vance’s belief that women must be either compelled into childbirth or denied full citizenship is obviously of a piece with his party’s ambition to impose a national abortion ban. But it also flows from their opposition to no-fault divorce rights; their insistence that teens must not be able to access sexual, reproductive or transition-related healthcare without the approval of their parents; their rejection of IVF, diversity initiatives, and anti-discrimination protections; and their opposition to myriad other public policy initiatives that have helped advance women’s health, protect their safety, and allow them full access to work, education and the public sphere.
The Republican plan, in short, is to sabotage or revoke any cultural or policy change that allows women to live as men’s equals. They instead aim to reshape policy, culture and the law to keep women in the home, dependent, without control over their own bodies and at the mercy of men.
They aim, that is, to advance so-called “family values” in which birth is mandatory, marriage is inescapable, children are property rather than persons with rights of their own, and men are in charge. There’s a word for this dark vision of a world in which the private sphere is wholly controlled by husbands and fathers. That word is “patriarchy”.
But the creepy and unsubtle patriarchal vision of gender and the family that is being advanced by the Trump-Vance Republican party may also present an opportunity for Harris and the Democrats to reclaim the mantle of “family”, and to redefine it for a better future. Rather than a compulsory, inescapable and unequal institution based on sexist domination, a “family” might instead be an alliance of equality, mutuality and care – one in which sovereign individuals can choose one another, and come together in an effort to love one another, respect one another, and help one another to thrive.
These are, after all, the kinds of families that many Americans find themselves inhabiting: ones in which romantic partners might be gay or straight, married or not, but view themselves as equal partners; ones in which ties of blood, marriage, love, history and affinity all blend together in layers of connection and mutuality, ones in which children are wholly voluntary, chosen and loved, and in which women are sovereigns over their own bodies and lives, whose ambitions in the public world are neither impeded nor resented in the private one.
These non-hierarchical, non-domineering, voluntary families can be encouraged through policy: through free, safe and legal abortion access, through free childcare, through paid family leave, affordable healthcare, high-quality care for seniors, insurance coverage for assisted reproductive technology, access to the full range of healthcare services for children and teens, and a thriving public school system. Such investments would help the sorts of families that most people want to build: ones that honor the dignity and worth of everyone in them.
Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist
