Usha Vance, the wife of Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), defended her husband’s controversial comments about “childless cat ladies” following bipartisan backlash.

In an interview with Fox and Friends that aired on Monday, Usha Vance argued the Republican vice presidential nominee’s remarks were taken out of context.

“The reality is he made a quip in service of making a point that he wanted to make that was substantive, and it had actual meaning,” she said. “And I just wish sometimes that people would talk about those things and that we would spend a lot less time just sort of going through this three-word phrase or that three-word phrase.”

“What he was really saying is that it can be really hard to be a parent in this country, and sometimes our policies are designed in a way that make it even harder,” she continued. “And we should be asking ourselves, ‘Why is that true? What is it about our leadership and the way that they think about the world that makes it so hard sometimes for parents?’”

She added that her husband “would never, ever, ever want to say something to hurt someone who was trying to have a family, who really was struggling with that.”

“He made that clear at the time. And he’s made that clear today. And we have lots of friends who have been in that position. It is challenging and never, ever anything that anyone would want to mock or make fun of. And I also understand there are a lot of other reasons why people may choose not to have families, and many of those reasons are very good,” Usha Vance said.

J.D. Vance came under fire last month for comments he made on Tucker Carlson’s show in 2021 when he was running for Ohio’s Senate seat. 

He said at the time that the country was being run by “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.”

“It’s just a basic fact that if you look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC, the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children,” the Ohio senator added. “And how does it make any sense that we’ve turned our country over to people who don’t really have a direct stake in it?”

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J.D. Vance defended his comments on SiriusXM’s The Megyn Kelly Show last month, calling the “cat ladies” remark a “sarcastic comment” and accusing the media of “focusing so much on the sarcasm and not on the substance of what I actually said.”

“I explicitly said in my remarks … this is not about criticizing people who, for various reasons, don’t have kids. This is about criticizing the Democratic Party for becoming anti-family and anti-child,” he said.