Column: From one parent to Republicans: Stop using our children as political footballs

My husband and I have three children. This makes us many things: Proud, exhausted, delighted, occasionally irritated, perpetually anxious, often overwhelmed by love and strangely aware of the varying quality of chicken strips in grocery store freezer sections.

It does not, however, make us better people, more engaged citizens or entitled to have a greater say in this country’s political future. Do I have more sunscreen, band-aids and hair ties on my person than my child-free relatives, friends and colleagues at any given time? Perhaps. Does this make me more valuable to society than they are? Most certainly not.

So on behalf of parents everywhere, I would like to respectfully request that Republicans — including but not limited to Ohio Sen. JD Vance and Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders — stop trying to drive yet another wedge into our already divided nation by suggesting (and, in Vance’s case, outright stating) that people who have children are superior to those who don’t.

Because honestly, you are giving parents a bad name. And what with the school shootings, the lack of subsidized childcare and the current attack on reproductive rights, not to mention the fact that Christmas will arrive in stores on Nov. 1, we have enough to deal with.

Vance has spent much of his political career denouncing nonparents. Now, as the Republican vice-presidential nominee, he is targeting Vice President Kamala Harris and her now-infamous circle of “childless cat ladies.” (In Vance’s definition of parenting, Harris’ two stepchildren don’t count.)

On Tuesday, Huckabee Sanders jumped onto this perilous and bizarre bandwagon. While introducing former President Trump at a rally in Michigan, Sanders underlined the importance of humility in politics by telling a quaint story from motherhood. But the true purpose of the anecdote became clear in her follow-up. “So my kids keep me humble,” she said. “Unfortunately, Kamala Harris doesn’t have anything keeping her humble.”

Which is pretty much when I began screaming.

First of all, if you are relying on your children to keep you “humble” while you turn one of their innocent remarks into a political barb on national television, you really need to re-think your parenting priorities.

Second, Harris does have children, and though I do not have any experience as a stepmother, I cannot imagine anything more humbling, or difficult, than becoming a co-parent of children who have experienced divorce, something Harris has done with apparent success.

Most important: Stop trying to create a pro-natalist social hierarchy where none exists. It’s anti-democratic and, in this particular case, outrageously sexist. To suggest that a woman is somehow lacking because she has not had the physical experience of giving birth or raising a child from infancy is absurd and dangerous. (For what it’s worth, Vance’s wife, Usha, recently attempted to assure those who at least tried to have children that his attacks weren’t about them. Feel better yet?)

Also absurd and dangerous is the argument that parents — a role that can encompass all manner of love, support, dysfunction and hideous abuse — are intrinsically more valuable than people who are not. Linking procreation to political power or patriotism is never a good sign for a society; given that women still do the majority of parenting in this country, there is more than a little whiff of Germany’s “Kinder, Küche, Kirche” (children, kitchen, church) about this new sanctification of parenthood.

It’s also insulting to the growing number of Americans who say they simply do not want to have children. Which I personally applaud. Mercifully, most Americans no longer need to have children to work the farm, earn money as child laborers or be traded away in marriage. Birth control allows heterosexual couples to engage in sex without leading to bushels of children and women dead of exhaustion. People of all gender and sexual identities are allowed to marry and have children or do neither of those things without being cast out of society.

Yes, humans, like virtually every life form, have a need to procreate — but in aggregate, not individually. And thank God. Overpopulation drives climate change, ecological degradation, housing scarcity and food scarcity. One in five American children already live with hunger.

So isn’t it great that, unlike our ancestors, most of us get to choose when and if we have children?

Not according to Vance and a growing number of pro-natalist politicians who seem determined to turn parents against nonparents. (Good luck with that. Who but the nonparents will buy your kids the super fancy Christmas presents? Who but the parents can dispatch a team of teenagers to help you move?)

Vance regularly points to declining birth rates in the U.S. and other developed nations as the impetus for his sanctification of parenthood. Our culture, he says, has become “anti-family.” This is patently ridiculous. Our cultural narratives remain overwhelmed by celebrations of adults who choose to have and/or raise children (with the added demographic bonus of including queer and single-parent households), just as they continue to celebrate monogamous couples. “The Bachelor” franchise has moved into the “golden years,” for heaven’s sake!

If anything is “anti-family” in America, it’s our social infrastructure — certainly the one that Vance, Sanders and other conservatives envision. Their policies are diametrically opposed to their purported desire for Americans to have more babies: No national childcare program, no federal IVF protections, draconian and deadly abortion laws and deep cuts to food assistance, healthcare, childcare and education.

Here’s a tip from someone in the trenches: If you want to improve the birth rate, make it easier for people to actually have children. Including by supporting their reproductive right to decide when and with whom.

What does not help, in any way, is the vilification of people who do not have children.

Particularly when the refusal to admit that stepchildren “count” is perilously close to the suggestion that “having children” means “having your own biological children.” Thereby discounting adoption, surrogacy, the use of donor eggs or sperm, fostering, extended family care and all of the myriad types of parenting that do not involve a heterosexual couple bearing and raising the fruit of their combined chromosomes.

So if not your family, then half of your friends’ families.

But even if Republican ire is directed only at those who simply choose not to produce or parent a child, the suggestion that a child-free voter is less invested in the future remains bigoted and ridiculous. Five presidents, including George Washington (if stepkids don’t count), did not have children. Neither did Plato, Beethoven, Isaac Newton, Michelangelo, Susan B. Anthony, Julia Child, Leonardo Da Vinci, Queen Elizabeth I or, of course, Jesus of Nazareth.

Yet somehow they all managed to have quite an impact on the future.

Of course, historical examples and evidence of social impact should not be required to see nonparents as whole people, and full citizens. Most of us parents will not make “noteworthy” lists of any kind. People are allowed to choose whether or not to be parents because that is their right. Full stop. They do not owe anyone an explanation any more than a parent owes anyone an answer to “Why did you have all these kids?”

Parents who view their child-free peers as inherently selfish or lazy or “not humble” reveal more about themselves than the people they are judging. Do you not like your kids for themselves? Do you need to tell yourself a story about how they are making you a better, more significant person?

Society needs all sorts of people with a variety of life experiences and viewpoints to function well, and diversity comes in many forms. Happiness with your choice is most evident when you’re not trying to foist it onto someone else or make the choices of others into a weird crusade. Because having kids is (or should be) a personal decision based on desire and self-knowledge not familial, social or political pressure.

Children are not status symbols, political or otherwise. No child should be raised by people who do not really want to have children in the first place; it’s a difficult enough task for those of us who do.