“Obviously, it was a sarcastic comment,” he said in an interview on “The Megyn Kelly Show” on SiriusXM. “I’ve got nothing against cats. I’ve got nothing against dogs. … People are focusing so much on the sarcasm and not on the substance of what I actually said. The substance of what I said, Megyn — I’m sorry, it’s true.” 

“These people want to conflate the personal situation here with the fact that I’m making an argument that our entire society has become skeptical and even hateful towards the idea of having kids,” he said later. 

During an appearance on Fox News in 2021, Vance, who was running for his Ohio Senate seat, said the U.S. 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.” 

He continued, “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. 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 made similar remarks against Democrats in a 2021 speech at the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, in which he said his criticism was not directed at those who could not have children for biological or medical reasons.