Jennifer Aniston isn’t holding back when it comes to addressing J.D. Vance’s resurfaced comments about the misery of childless women, saying she hopes his own daughter will never struggle with infertility or with trying to get pregnant via in vitro fertilization, a procedure that Donald Trump’s running mate has voted against making more accessible.
“I truly can’t believe this is coming from a potential VP of The United States,” the “Friends” alum wrote on her Instagram Story Wednesday, according to The Hollywood Reporter. “All I can say is … Mr. Vance, I pray that your daughter is fortunate enough to bear children of her own one day.”
Aniston has opened up in the past about trying to conceive via IVF and about dealing with media gossip about her not having children. She continued to cite Vance’s 2-year-old daughter Mirabel as she blasted the incendiary comments he made in 2021, when the father of three said that miserable “cat ladies” are running the Democratic Party and that people without children have no stake in the country’s future.
Aniston said: “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 “Friends” alum is referring to Vance, an Ohio senator, joining other Senate Republicans in June to vote down a bill that would have established a nationwide right to IVF and other assisted reproductive technology, and would have made these procedures more affordable and accessible.
In her post, Aniston shared a screenshot of a tweet, which featured Vance’s July 2021 interview with then-Fox News host Tucker Carlson. In the clip, the conservative former venture capitalist can be heard saying the United States was being run by “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable in their own lives and with the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.”
“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,” Vance continued, referencing U.S. Rep Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-New York City, in the interview. “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?”
In his diatribe, Vance falsely characterized Harris and Buttigieg’s status as parents. Vice President Harris, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, is the stepmother to her husband’s son and daughter, while Transportation Secretary Buttigieg and his husband adopted twin newborns in November 2021.
Aniston’s comments come a week after Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, picked Vance as his vice president at the Republican National Convention ahead of the 2024 election. Vance and his wife Usha share three children, Miracle, 2, Vivek, 4, and Ewan, 6.
The Emmy-winning actress has previously addressed false rumors that she’s dealt with her entire career — reports that she’s pregnant, trying to get pregnant or that she prioritized her career over having children. She told Allure in 2022 that it was “really hard” to see the fake reports, while revealing that she had tried to conceive through IVF.
“All the years and years and years of speculation … It was really hard,” Aniston said at the time. “I was going through IVF, drinking Chinese teas, you name it. I was throwing everything at it. I would have given anything if someone had said to me, ‘Freeze your eggs. Do yourself a favor.’ You just don’t think it.”
Before that, she wrote an essay for the Huffington Post in 2016, saying she was completely “fed up” with the way that women often face scrutiny if they don’t have children after a certain point.
“Here’s where I come out on this topic: We are complete with or without a mate, with or without a child. We get to decide for ourselves what is beautiful when it comes to our bodies. That decision is ours and ours alone,” Aniston wrote. “Let’s make that decision for ourselves and for the young women in this world who look to us as examples. Let’s make that decision consciously, outside of the tabloid noise. We don’t need to be married or mothers to be complete. We get to determine our own ‘happily ever after’ for ourselves.”
