WASHINGTON — Comments made by Ohio Sen. JD Vance during a Senate committee hearing last year, in which he appeared to blame car seat regulations for contributing to the decline in America’s birthrate, have gained attention on social media this week.
Vance, former President Donald Trump’s vice-presidential running mate, has talked about family dynamics on the campaign trail leading up to November’s election, often sparking criticism.
But these remarks were made in March 2023, as the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, heard testimony on proposals to enhance consumer protections in air transportation.
This week, as a result of social media, they’re getting renewed attention.
Vance’s remarks about car seats came at the close of an exchange with Sara Nelson, the international president of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, about heightening requirements for safety seating on airplanes. The exchange occurs about one hour and 45 minutes into the hearing.
The union was advocating for new Federal Aviation Administration mandates requiring children under the age of 2 to be restrained in special seats during flights.
Vance said he wasn’t sure that was the right approach and suggested to Nelson that the focus should be to “fit it in with some other changes that would make things easier on parents as you’re advocating for that particular approach.”
He noted that a long flight with a young child strapped into a seat for hours would be “torture for everybody” and perhaps not worth the headaches to parents given that airline incidents are so infrequent.
Then he focused on car seats.
“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, Vance said. “American families aren’t having enough children.”
Then he addressed why.
“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,” he said. “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. So, as we think about how to make kids safe here, I think we should do it in a way that’s accommodating to American families, and I encourage your organization to do that.”
During his testimony, Vance didn’t specify where he got the estimate of more than 100,000 fewer babies. USA Today and the fact-checking site Snopes each sought comment from Vance’s staff, without success.
A social media post on TikTok this week by user @WhatTheActualKaren, whose bio identifies her as “Team Kamala,” focused on the car seat remarks and showed an excerpt of the testimony.
The post had more than 1.4 million views by Thursday. Commenters were merciless.
“As my husband and I were discussing having children, he turned to me and said ‘what about the car seats though?’ I said ‘you’re right, let’s just forget about it,’” TikTok user ktduncan33 posted.
“Omg yes! The $300 car seat has been THE biggest deterrent! (Not the $450/week childcare, definitely not that.),” ECEC said.
“Seriously if a decent car seat didn’t cost $100 then I could afford $24,000/year for daycare AND a $400,000 house,” therrblurr wrote.
Snopes speculated a paper written in 2020 about how parents view car seats, considering their price and other factors, may have influenced Vance. In that paper, written by Jordan Nickerson, an associate professor of finance at the University of Washington, and David Solomon, a finance professor at Boston College, specifically said they were not advocating car seat regulations were driving down birthrates.
“Anecdotally, it is rare to find people who will openly state that car seats concretely stopped them having a third child. But it is quite common to find people who cite car seats as being a pain and a hassle that they had to deal with, especially in the context of having a third child.” Snopes quoted from the paper.
The paper seemed to advocate for “easing” safety restrictions for car seats “to increase birthrates,” Snopes said.
