Chrissy Houlahan rips JD Vance’s “childless cat ladies” comments, says he’s not fit for VP

US Sen. JD Vance’s “childless cat ladies” comments angered women across the country. Congresswoman Houlahan says he’s not qualified to be vice president after those comments resurfaced.

Congresswoman Chrissy Houlahan (D-Chester) told reporters on Thursday that US Sen. JD Vance (R-OH) is not qualified to be vice president after his remarks about  “childless cat ladies” resurfaced on social media last month. 

“My heart rate goes up when you say it because I’m trying to be civil and decent about my response,” Houlahan said when asked about Vance’s comments. 

“It shows that he is not qualified to be vice president and to be a heartbeat away from being the President of the United States, when he so clearly doesn’t understand women, our rights as humans on this planet, as voters on this planet, and frankly just doesn’t understand families either,” she said. “That to me makes sure that I understand that he’s unqualified for this position.”

Houlahan joined Democratic officials and party leaders from Lancaster County at the Lancaster County Democratic Committee headquarters on Thursday for a press conference raising awareness of former president Donald Trump’s anti-abortion record. 

“We have to win because we know what the Trump administration’s first four years were: They were a warmup,” said Lancaster Mayor Danene Sorace.

“There is something very scary about your reproductive decisions — whether you’re going to have access to contraceptives, whether you want to seek in vitro fertilization, whether you need to have an abortion to save your life — that is a decision that no politician should be part of.”

A 2018 report from Pew Research shows that women were more likely to have children than in 2006 and that women are waiting later in life to have children.

Houlahan made clear that the decision of whether people want to have children should be left up to them and no one else. 

“I think that his narrative seems to be that women are making choices not to have children any longer so therefore we should do something about that,” she said. “In [Vance’s] mind and in the mind of Project 2025 and the mind of former President Trump, it’s to make sure that we have children, and I think that the ways that that’s happening is by undermining our choice by undermining our protected freedoms.” 

In his first term in office, Trump appointed three right-wing justices to the US Supreme Court who eventually overturned Roe v. Wade — something he has bragged about throughout his campaign. Vance, meanwhile, has something of an obsession with fertility rates and is on record as supporting abortion bans, without any exceptions. He has also said he believes parents should get more votes than non-parents and repeatedly attacked people who decide not to have children, calling them “sociopaths,” “psychotic,” and “deranged.”  

Stella Sexton, Chairwoman of the Lancaster County Democratic Committee, shared some anecdotal evidence of how Vance’s “childless cat lady” comments have landed in the Lancaster community. 

“Just from my own experience knocking doors and talking to real voters this weekend, there’s a lot of ladies who love their cats and when they see me coming with my Harris sign or my Harris literature, boy did they want to talk to me,” Sexton said. “That is something totally new that has shifted.”

“In fact, I had one voter who hadn’t heard about JD Vance’s comment. She was feeding four stray cats in her front yard. I started talking to her about the cats. I let her know what JD Vance’s comments were and she actually at that moment pulled up her phone and registered for a mail-in ballot.”