It Doesn’t Matter Whether a President Has Kids
Less than a week after Kamala Harris kicked off her run for president, two embarrassingly sexist lines of attack have emerged as the leading arguments against her from the right. The first is that she’s essentially a whore who slept her way into politics because she dated a former mayor of San Francisco, who was separated from his wife at the time, over 20 years ago. That one’s too stupid to engage with further. The second is that she’s unqualified for the highest office in the land because she has no biological children and therefore no personal stake in this country’s future.
This latter attack, predictable as it was from a party whose VP nominee has called women without children “miserable cat ladies,” has understandably inspired a variety of frustrated reactions and angry clapbacks from the left. Many have noted, correctly, that the vice-president has two stepchildren who lovingly nicknamed her “Momala” and that it’s insulting to insinuate stepchildren are somehow lesser than biological children. Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff’s ex-wife even came forward to defend Harris as a loving stepmother. Some have pointed out the irony of suddenly requiring that a presidential candidate be a biological mom when no president in U.S. history has actually given birth; others have poured out their own stories of struggling to have children to make the point that we shouldn’t judge anyone for being childless.
Valid as all these rebuttals may be, they’re missing the point. I’d like to look at the actual argument Republicans are putting forth here: that a candidate who has biological children necessarily makes a better leader because they have more of a stake in the future of the country and the welfare of future generations. It would make a compelling case, if true. But a comparison of Harris’s and Trump’s platforms and records makes clear that the candidate with biological children is the one who threatens young people and the future of the nation exponentially more than the stepmom.
Take the climate crisis. It’s real, it’s here, and it’s making the planet more difficult for humans to inhabit. But Trump pulled us out of the Paris Agreement in 2020, making us the only nation out of the 200 who signed the landmark deal in 2017 to renege on the climate-change commitment. The ultraconservative Supreme Court, a third of whom Trump appointed, also just overturned the 40-year-old Chevron deference doctrine, making it exponentially harder for government agencies to protect the public from environmental threats like toxic waste pouring into rivers. Harris, meanwhile, has been a leader on environmental justice her entire career, prosecuting polluters as California attorney general and later sponsoring the Green New Deal. “The urgency of this moment is clear,” she said at the global climate summit in Dubai last year. “The clock is no longer just ticking, it is banging. And we must make up for lost time.”
Trump also openly threatens the future of American democracy, drooling over murderous dictators like Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong-un, and Xi Jinping while fantasizing about ruling with an “iron fist.” And he would make conditions materially worse for future generations of Americans by continuing to widen the income-inequality gap with tax breaks for billionaires and gutting health-care and safety-net programs for low-income people. Harris, on the other hand, talks about strengthening the middle class and supports affordable housing and universal child care for working parents. Trump also remains staunchly pro-gun, despite guns being the leading cause of death for children and teens in the U.S., while Harris is prioritizing measures to prevent mass shootings in schools.
Trump’s entire platform is dedicated to rolling back social progress. His Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, reversing half a century of women’s hard-fought reproductive rights and jeopardizing the legality of IVF. Harris supports abortion rights and fertility treatments. Trump fans the flames of his party’s transphobic and homophobic panic, whereas Harris is a longtime champion of LGBTQ rights and beloved by the queer community. If one of these candidates is more forward-thinking, it’s her.
The enthusiasm and support young people have shown for Harris in her first days as a candidate all but proves this point. A new Axios poll conducted just after Biden stepped down Sunday showed that while young people favored Biden to Trump 53 to 47 percent, Harris widens that lead to 60 to 40 percent. It’s difficult to make the case that Harris would make a bad leader because she has “no skin in the game” without biological children when Gen Z clearly prefers the future she promises to the one Trump offers.
As a 40-year-old single woman without kids, I’ve been as inclined as everyone else to take the “childless cat lady” argument personally. The irony of Republicans yelling at us to have more babies while opposing IVF and universal child care is infuriating. But it’s more important to stress that what we need from a president is a policy platform that empathetically considers future generations, and whether or not a politician has children does not appear to be a predictor of that qualification. Trump is hardly aware that his second daughter, Tiffany, even exists. I’ll take the cat lady with exponentially better ideas.