Attacking Kamala Harris for Not Having Kids Will Backfire

On Sunday, almost immediately after prominent Democrats started endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris for president, attacks from the political right started pouring in. Will Chamberlain, a conservative lawyer who worked on Ron DeSantis’s presidential campaign, posted on X that Harris “shouldn’t be President” because she doesn’t have biological children; “becoming a step-parent to older teenagers doesn’t count,” he wrote, adding that “The concerns of parents and families will always be abstract to her” because she doesn’t have “skin in the game, a stake in the future, and the lived experience of raising children.”

First, let’s note the obvious: If elected, Harris wouldn’t be the first American president with no biological children. There were five others: George Washington, James Madison, Andrew Jackson, James Polk and James Buchanan. (Warren Harding had a child out of wedlock and publicly denied paternity; that he was the father was confirmed by DNA testing almost a century later.)

But more to the point, if you think that the concerns of parents and families will always be “abstract” to someone who doesn’t have children, you’re telling on yourself. It’s not simply that, by all accounts, Harris has a close, loving relationship with her stepkids. It’s that it’s possible for people who have basic empathy to understand the needs, aspirations and concerns of fellow citizens who aren’t exactly like them — and to commit to their well-being.

It actually should be a requirement for presidential candidates to have compassion for people they’ll never meet. And it strikes me as anti-American to argue that a politician is any less invested in families or our country’s future because of his or her own parental status. It should go without saying, but: Having children doesn’t necessarily make you a better person.

This argument is also appallingly dismissive to so many adults who dote on the children in their lives and devote time, money and care to helping them grow, regardless of whether they are related by blood. It’s even more hurtful to people who really want to have children but are unable to.

This is, also, not a new tactic for the right. As a way of clinging to the tag line that the G.O.P. is the pro-family party — despite working, during the Biden years, to defeat federal legislation that included paid family leave and affordable high-quality child care — some Republicans are content to paint the Democratic Party as the party of “childless cat ladies.”