Letter from America | MAGA’s weird obsession with women’s bodies

IT'S a warm summer evening in Los Angeles.

A group of friends who met each other through their children's school are gathered for an informal supper at a house in Santa Monica. The children playing Monopoly at the card table are diverse — black, brown and white. Some come from nuclear families, some from blended families, and two are adopted and have grown up in a single-parent, female-headed household. 

The conversation turns to politics — inevitable in this strangest of presidential campaigns featuring an unexpected new Democratic candidate after Joe Biden dropped out of the race; Donald Trump in full belligerent MAGA-mode; and a Republican vice-presidential candidate with polarising views on many things, but women and family specifically.

In 2021, while running for the Senate, JD Vance explained what he saw as one of America's biggest problems — that it was being run “by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable with their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too”.

He mentioned Vice President Kamala Harris by name.

One couple recounts that Harris's stepdaughter, Ella, was in a class with their daughter and how Harris, then California's attorney general, would attend parent evenings and events at the school like any other committed parent. “She was just a normal parent like the rest of us."

The biological mother of Harris's stepchildren fiercely defended Harris after Vance's views on her being a “childless cat lady" went viral.

“For over 10 years, since Cole and Ella were teenagers, Kamala has been a co-parent with Doug and I,” Kerstin Emhoff said in a statement first provided to CNN. “She is loving, nurturing, fiercely protective, and always present. I love our blended family and am grateful to have her in it.”

Ella, too, has defended her stepmother, whom she calls “Momala". She shared a photo on her Instagram stories captioned: “How can you be ‘childless' when you have cutie pie kids like Cole and I?"

Obsessed with women’s bodies

Vance has an unseemly obsession with procreation — and women's bodies. As one New York Times columnist says, it makes you wonder whether he thinks he has been nominated as the vice president of the Republic of Gilead.

Vance blames “the childless left" for the nation's woes, says the Democrats are “anti-family", and believes people without children cannot be trusted to make decisions in the interest of society at large because they have no “physical commitment" to the country's future.

He says Americans without children should “face the consequences and the reality” and not get “nearly the same voice” in a democracy as those with children. And that parents of under-18s should get extra votes —essentially to be able to cast votes on behalf of their underage children.

“When you go to the polls in this country as a parent, you should have more power … Let’s give votes to all the children in this country, and let’s give control over votes to the parents in this country."

Abortion

Vance bemoans the “family formation" and birth rates in the US, and his weird views of Americans needing to have more babies dovetail with his beliefs about abortion.

Since being named as Trump's running mate, he has been trying to moderate these views somewhat, but he has built his political career around his extreme position on abortion.

He has been vocal about supporting a complete ban on abortions (including in cases of rape and incest — pregnancies he has referred to as “inconvenient circumstances"). During his campaign to be elected senator for Ohio, he was also a vociferous supporter of a “national ban", saying it was necessary to stop women from travelling across state borders to obtain an abortion.

And it gets weirder.

In a recently surfaced clip from a podcast interview two years ago, Vance ponders how women should be stopped from circumventing a ban by going to states that might allow abortion.

“Here’s a situation — let’s say Roe v Wade is overruled [which it since has been, with 16 states subsequently instituting abortion bans]. Ohio bans abortion in 2022, or let’s say, 2024. And then, you know, every day George Soros sends a 747 to Columbus to load up disproportionately black women to get them to have abortions in California. And, of course, the left will celebrate this as a victory for diversity — uh, that’s kind of creepy.”

Patriarchy

While Vance's views are blatantly anti-democratic, they also capture how prospective leaders in a second Trump administration are likely to define family.

Project 2025 is a 908-page blueprint for how the next Republican president should wield his power. It was written by the right-wing Heritage Foundation with input from more than 100 conservative groups and authored by several Trump allies.

Trump has been trying to distance himself from this document, recently saying in a Fox television interview that it was written by “a group of extremely conservative people” with whom he disagrees. But distancing himself from these extreme views is tricky when his vice-presidential pick wrote the foreword to the document and praised it for its “good ideas”.

The ultra-conservative manifesto is steeped in Christian nationalism and says the “good life is found in family, marriage, and children". It explicitly seeks to restore “the family" to the centre of American life.

And this version of family is a specifically a nuclear one where white Christian men have power and exercise it over their wives and children. It is an unapologetic harking back to traditional patriarchy, proposing, for instance, to change divorce legislation to limit or end a spouse's ability to leave a marriage without establishing “fault".

This dovetails with Vance's position on divorce that emerged in another interview from 2021, this time about his book Hillbilly Elegy in which he recounts his upbringing in a poor part of rural Kentucky.

“One of the great tricks that I think the sexual revolution pulled on the American populace" was convincing people in “unhappy" or “even violent" marriages that getting divorced would “make people happier in the long term".

He also criticised people who “shift spouses like they change their underwear" — ironic when MAGA's supreme leader is on his third marriage.

Abortion

The sole purpose of women in the perfect Project 2025 society is to have babies, even if it kills them.

Abortion is mentioned 199 times in the manifesto. As part of the project's wish list, Republicans are called on to regulate pregnancy and abortion by misinterpreting a 19th-century law known as the Comstock Act to ban the mailing of drugs and instruments used in abortions.

It also proposes strict surveillance on abortions: “Because liberal states have now become sanctuaries for abortion tourism, HHS [the Department of Health and Human Services] should use every available tool, including the cutting of funds, to ensure that every state reports exactly how many abortions take place within its borders, at what gestational age of the child, for what reason, the mother’s state of residence, and by what method."

The manifesto also proposes turning the HHS into the “Department of Life", charging it with promoting heterosexuality as “the ideal family unit", and adding federal benefits to that.

Serious Gilead vibes.

Going back

Trump chose Vance as his running mate before Biden dropped out of the race, clearly hoping his life story would resonate with the aggrieved MAGA base.

But with Harris at the top of the Democratic ticket, the election's dynamic has radically changed and Vance's weird views might turn out to be heavy baggage.

Although Harris still has plenty of ground to make up, the Democrats are no longer on the road to inevitable defeat in November.

She has wiped out Trump's lead in all the key swing states, and the latest poll shows her leading Trump by 11 points in Michigan, a key battleground.

A poll released by YouGov/The Economist on Wednesday found that support for Harris is surging, particularly among women, with a nine-point gain in this key demographic in less than three weeks. The poll, conducted from July 27 to July 30, found that 50% of women voters chose Harris, while 39% preferred Trump.

“We are not going back” has emerged as a key slogan of Harris’s presidential campaign. But if the Republicans win — and despite Harris's surge, Trump continues to hold a slight edge overall — women might indeed be going back. Way, way back.

♦ VWB ♦

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