Republicans think Kamala Harris can’t be president because she hasn’t had children | Moira Donegan

Introducing Donald Trump is a strange occasion to talk about humility. To put it mildly, humility is not a quality that the former president is known for. But Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the former Trump press secretary and current governor of Arkansas, decided to muse about humility on stage in Michigan on Tuesday night. She told a story about watching her daughter get ready for a father-daughter dance, and of the moment when her daughter turned to her and said: "It's OK, Mommy. One day you can be pretty, too."

"My kids keep me humble," Sanders said of the exchange. "Unfortunately, Kamala Harris doesn't have anything keeping her humble."

It was the latest in a series of attacks by Republicans on childless Americans, and among the more direct comments by Trump surrogates suggesting that Harris is morally suspect and unqualified for power because she has not given birth.

This is usually JD Vance's line. The vice-presidential candidate and Ohio senator has been the most prominent face of Republican pro-natalism, responding to the overturning of Roe v Wade by the conservative-controlled supreme court with a series of public statements seeking to degrade childless women and advocating for their diminished citizenship.

It is Vance who has derided prominent Democrats as "childless cat ladies", referred to adults without children as "sociopathic" and suggested that Americans who have not reproduced should have fewer votes. That Sanders, largely seen as an heir to the party's Christian conservative wing, has taken up this pro-natalist rhetoric indicates that other sections of the Republican party are willing to make misogynist contempt of childless women a center of their campaign strategy.

Supporters of Harris are quick to point out that the vice-president does have children: she has stepchildren. Cole and Ella Emhoff, the products of Harris's husband Doug Emhoff's first marriage, have been a part of Harris's family since they were teenagers; reportedly, they sometimes call her "Momala". (Ella Emhoff, in particular, has become a target of rightwing ire for her tattoos, large glasses and a fashion sense I can only describe as "Ridgewood basement chic": her style of femininity, the right never tires of reminding us, is one of which they do not approve.)

In the wake of Sanders' remarks disparaging Harris for not being a mother, her campaign surrogates were eager to cite her enmeshment in a loving and very modern blended family. Kerstin Emhoff, Doug Emhoff's ex-wife and the mother of Harris's stepchildren, took to Twitter to defend Harris. "Kamala Harris has spent her entire career working for the people, ALL families," she wrote.