JD Vance, the Republican Vice Presidential candidate, already blamed Kamala Harris for the Ram 1500 Classic’s death earlier this year. He’s now under fire for even more absurd comments made during a Senate committee hearing in March 2023. The junior U.S. Senator from Ohio said that government car seat mandates have significantly lowered the nation’s birth rate.
Vance confusingly swerved onto the topic of car seats during a hearing on airline consumer protections, according to the New York Times. We may never know precisely why Vance has a prejudice against childless women, bordering on existential fear, but we know he said:
One thing that I really worry about, and I think both Democrats and Republicans should worry about, is we have some real demographic problems in our country. American families aren’t having enough children. And I think there’s evidence that some of the things that we’re doing to parents is driving down the number of children that American families are having. In particular, there’s evidence that the car-seat rules that we’ve imposed — which, of course, I want kids to drive in car seats — have driven down the number of babies born in this country by over 100,000.
First, Vance is wrong. He claims there’s evidence to support this claim. The little evidence there is primarily points to car seats as the symptom of much larger forces at play. To paraphrase James Carville, “It’s the economy, stupid.” A 2020 research paper, “Car Seats as Contraception,” published in the Journal of Law and Economics, explored the topic. The paper crudely calculated that car seat mandates lowered the annual probability of a woman giving birth to a third child by 0.73 percent.
The takeaway should be that people aren’t having more kids because of the financial burden for the average household, not because they have to buy a car seat. Yes, the paper estimated there were 145,000 fewer births since 1980. However, loosening the laws around car seats would just kill children, as our understanding of children’s safety in cars has grown by leaps and bounds since then.