Jennifer Aniston slams JD Vance’s childless-cat-ladies slur

Jennifer Aniston has criticised Donald Trump’s vice-presidential candidate, JD Vance, for resurfaced comments calling Democrats a “bunch of childless cat ladies with miserable lives”.

The Friends actress made the statement on her Instagram Stories, sharing Mr Vance’s 2021 interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, which has been widely shared in the run up to the November presidential election.

“I truly can’t believe that this is coming from a potential VP of the United States,” she wrote.

“All I can say is… Mr Vance, I pray that your daughter is fortunate enough to bear children of her own one day.”

Mr Vance has a two-year-old daughter, and two sons.

“I hope she will not need to turn to IVF as a second option,” Ms Aniston wrote.

“Because you are trying to take that away from her, too.”

The actress has previously spoken openly about trying to have children through in-vitro fertilisation (IVF).

Last month, Mr Vance voted to block Democrat-proposed legislation to guarantee access to IVF nationwide.

In the clip, Mr Vance criticises Vice-President Kamala Harris because she has no biological children.

Ms Harris is stepmother to her husband Doug Emhoff’s two children.

But Mr Vance tells Mr Carlson the US is 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”.

“Look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC [Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez], the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children,” he says.

“How does it make any sense we’ve turned our country over to people who don’t really have a direct stake in it?”

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg also addressed the comments earlier this week, speaking about adopting twins with his husband, Chasten.

“The really sad thing is he said that after Chasten and I had been through a fairly heartbreaking setback in our adoption journey,” Mr Buttigieg told CNN’s The Source programme.

“He couldn’t have known that – but maybe that’s why you shouldn’t be talking about other people’s children.”

There has also been backlash from fans of singer-songwriter Taylor Swift, who has no children – and three cats.

“It’s bold, for someone seeking votes, to hone in on ‘childless cat ladies’ when the leader of Childless Cat Ladies is Taylor Swift,” Caitlin Moran wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter.

Another X user shared the Time magazine cover where Swift posed with one of her cats, writing: “Hell hath no fury like a certain childless cat lady who has yet to endorse a presidential candidate.”

In 2022, Ms Aniston told Allure she wished someone had told her to freeze her eggs.

“It was a challenging road for me, the baby-making road,” she said.

“All the years and years of speculation… it was really hard.

“I was going through IVF, drinking Chinese teas, you name it.”

But she had “zero regrets”.

“I would’ve given anything if someone had said to me, ‘Freeze your eggs. Do yourself a favour.’ You just don’t think it. So here I am today,” she told the magazine.

“The ship has sailed.”