So here are some interesting facts from the Paris Olympics: Women accounted for more than 50 percent of the medals won by Team USA and two-thirds of our gold medals. If the US women were a separate country, American women would have ranked second in the world in the medal count, behind only China.
Those statistics struck a chord for us in the context of the controversial comments made by Republican vice-presidential candidate JD Vance in which he essentially blames women for not having enough children to maintain our population at a stable rate. (We should point out here that America’s population is growing thanks to the recent influx of immigrants, who thankfully are doing all of the labor-intensive jobs that American citizens either don’t want to do or are too old to do.
Vance’s now-infamous quote offering his view of women in leadership positions in our country — “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too” — and his other comments, in which he proposes incentivizing women, via the tax code and voting rights, to have more children, make it clear that Vance and the MAGA movement believe women should be barefoot, pregnant, and in the kitchen.
The Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade two years ago and the suggestion by some (such as Justice Clarence Thomas) that the court’s birth control decisions from more than 50 years ago also should be overturned to allow for regulation by the states highlight the extent to which the MAGA crowd wants to control women. Even more telling, the controversial Project 2025 document that was put forward by prominent Republican groups proposes eliminating child support and alimony so as to discourage divorces, further demonstrating that the MAGA movement seeks to return women to an era of subjugation to their husbands, even in abusive relationships.
But we have news for these folks: Beyond our women’s achievements at the Olympics, America is great in every respect thanks to our women, who now make up about 60 percent of college graduates and who constitute a majority of law school and medical school students in our country. Without the contributions of women in the U.S. workforce, our economy, which is the strongest, most-dynamic economy in the world, would be a shell of what it is today.
We also would suggest to JD Vance and others of his ilk that the real blame for the decline in our birth rate lies primarily with American men, who all-too-often are lazy and lacking in ambition, and who engage in risky, juvenile behavior that makes them unattractive as spouses and potential fathers.
The bottom line is simply this: American women, from the Olympics to all aspects of our society, are making America the greatest nation on earth today.