Ostensibly, JD Vance was supposed to be talking about consumer protections in the airline industry, but at the end of his time he went off on another wild tangent about seat belt laws contributing to lower fertility in American families, another one of his crackpot theories that seem to have originated in an academic paper.
JD Vance is weird. Very weird.
Source: USA Today
A resurfaced video clip of Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance is once again taking off on the internet as economic issues and family dynamics continue to dominate the election cycle.
This particular clip from 2023 is gaining traction because Vance indicates that car seats are preventing people from having more babies.
A TikTok of Vance made by user @WhatTheActualKaren, whose bio identifies her as "Team Kamala," shows an excerpt of his exchange with Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, AFL-CIO president Sara Nelson at a March 2023 Senate hearing for the Committee on Commerce, Science, & Transportation.
The longer video from the hearing, originally surfaced by Snopes, shows Vance advocating for balancing marginal safety improvements for infants on airplanes with the stressors they might put on the kids and parents.
"American families aren't having enough children. 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," Vance says in the video.
"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."
