Jennifer Aniston responds to JD Vance’s “childless cat ladies” remark

Actress Jennifer Aniston hit back at Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance for past comments he made about lawmakers he described as “childless cat ladies.” “The Morning Show” and “Friends” star responded to a post about Vance on her Instagram Stories.

“I truly can’t believe this is coming from a potential VP of the United States,” Aniston wrote Wednesday. “All I can say is… Mr. Vance, 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 as a second option. Because you are trying to take that away from her, too.”

The post Aniston was replying to featured a tweet with part of a 2021 Fox News interview from “Tucker Carlson Tonight.” In the clip, the then-Ohio Senate candidate took aim at some Democrats who haven’t given birth and said we “turned our country over to people who don’t really have a direct stake in it.” 

“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 choices that they’ve made,” Vance told Carlson. “And they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too … You look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC. The entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children.”

Vance, who is Ohio’s junior senator, was chosen last week to be former President Trump’s running mate in the 2024 presidential election. Vance’s positions on abortion and IVF have been brought up by Democrats after the announcement. 

Vance said in 2022 that he’d back a national ban on abortions after 15 weeks, but also indicated that he supports Trump on leaving the question to the states. 

He was among the Senate Republicans who voted in June to block legislation that would protect access to IVF.

In response to a request for a comment, a spokesperson for Vance’s campaign referred CBS News to other 2021 comments from Vance, in which he clarified that the “target of his remarks” made on Fox News are not people who are not able or can’t have children for a variety of reasons, including medical. 

In a statement to CBS News later Thursday, Taylor Van Kirk, a spokesperson for Vance, condemned “leftwing media” for having “spun up a false narrative about his position on the issues.”

“The Democrats are in complete disarray with the most unpopular Vice President in history as their party’s nominee,” Van Kirk said. “The only childlessness we should be talking about are the childless parents who lost their kids to the murderous thugs and deadly fentanyl coming across Kamala’s southern border.” 

Aniston opened up about her fertility struggles and IVF journey in 2022. She told Allure magazine that she was trying to get pregnant in her late 30s and 40s and revealed that she tried IVF. “It was a challenging road for me, the baby-making road,” she said. However, she has no regrets about how it all turned out.

“I actually feel a little relief now because there is no more, ‘Can I? Maybe. Maybe. Maybe.’ I don’t have to think about that anymore,” she said.

Additional reporting by Taurean Small.