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JD Vance agreed with the notion that raising grandchildren was “the whole purpose of the postmenopausal female,” an unearthed 2020 podcast shows.
Vance also seemed to concur when the host suggested that having grandparents help raise children was a “weird, unadvertised feature of marrying an Indian woman.”
It's the latest in comments from the Republican nominee for vice presdident about women and "traditional" roles that have drawn ire. Vance has faced intense criticism in recent weeks for previous sexist comments, including his remarks about "cat ladies."
Now, his appearance on ThePortal podcast with host Eric Weinstein in April 2020 has been thrust back into the limelight Vance spoke about his wife’s Indian family, noting that they emigrated to the US about a year before his wife, Usha Vance, was born. He said at the time, her parents were “devoted” to Usha and their grandchild as well as to “future grandchildren.”
The couple has three children, born in 2017, 2020 and in 2021.
“You can sort of see the effect it has on him to be around them like they spoil him,” he said of his first child. “There's sort of all the classic stuff that grandparents do to grandchildren, but it makes him a much better human being to have exposure to his grandparents.”
He added: “And the evidence on this is like super clear.”
“That’s the whole purpose of the postmenopausal female in theory,” Weinstein said at the time.
“Yes,” Vance agreed.
“When your child was born, did your in-laws, and particularly your mother-in-law, show up in some huge way?” Weinstein asked Vance.
“She lived with us for a year,” former President Donald Trump’s running mate noted.
“I didn't know the answer to that. So that's a weird, unadvertised feature of marrying an Indian woman,” Weinstein responded.
“It’s in some ways, the most transgressive thing I've ever done against sort of the hyper-neo-liberal approach to work and family,” Vance said. “My wife had this baby seven weeks before she started the clerkship, [she’s] still not sleeping any more than an hour and a half in a given interval. And her mom just took a sabbatical. She's a biology professor in California, just took a sabbatical for a year and came and lived with us and took care of our kid for a year.”
He added that it was “painfully economically inefficient.”
“Why didn't she just keep her job, give us part of the wages to pay somebody else to do it?” he asked. “That is the thing that the hyper-liberalized economics wants you to do. The economic logic of always prioritizing paid wage labor over other forms of contributing to a society is to me ... a consequence of a sort of fundamental liberalism that is ultimately gonna unwind and collapse upon itself.”
“It's the abandonment of a sort of Aristotelian virtue politics for a hyper-market-oriented way of thinking about what's good and what's desirable,” he added. “If people are paying for it and it contributes to GDP and it makes the economic consumption numbers rise, then it's good, and if it doesn't, it's bad ... that's sort of the root of our political problem.”
The Independent has contacted the Vance campaign for comment.
The Director of Rapid Response for Kamala Harris, Ammar Moussa, wrote on X: “I’m sorry - who is out here just out here talking about the ‘postmenopausal female’ and their role in society?”
Democratic Illinois Congressman Sean Casten added: “Are you a post-menopausal woman? Did you quit your job to look after your grandkids? Because if you didn’t, you are not meeting your ‘whole purpose’ according to JD Vance.”
Vance has faced criticism for a number of unearthed comments from his past, most notably telling Fox News host Tucker Carlson in 2021 that the US was being run 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.”
“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,” he said. “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?”
Harris has two stepchildren and Buttigieg, the transportation secretary, adopted twins in August 2021.
