In 1946, Bonnie Blanton was just thirteen years old when she became pregnant by her soon-to-be husband, Jim Vance, who was three years her senior. The couple lived in Jackson, a struggling Appalachian town in Kentucky. Fearing retaliation from Bonnie’s family and seeking better opportunities, they relocated to Middletown, Ohio—a booming steel town where Jim secured a well-paying union job, complete with stock options and a pension upon retirement. They moved into a four-bedroom house, but their newborn daughter survived less than a week. To protect Jim from legal consequences, Bonnie falsified her age on the infant’s birth certificate.

Decades later, their grandson J.D. Vance would reflect on this pivotal moment in his bestselling 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of Family and Culture in Crisis. “Without the baby, would she have ever left Jackson?” Vance wondered. That brief life, he suggested, may have altered the entire trajectory of their family. The book chronicles Vance’s own journey—from Appalachian roots to Yale Law School and, eventually, to Silicon Valley venture capital. By 2022, just six years after the memoir’s publication, he was elected as a U.S. senator from Ohio. Bonnie, meanwhile, never finished middle school. She went on to have three more children and suffered eight miscarriages.

Vance speculates in Hillbilly Elegy that the volatile relationship between his grandparents may have contributed to Bonnie’s pregnancy losses. Jim was a “violent drunk,” while Bonnie was a “violent nondrunk.” “I can’t help but wonder how many additional aunts and uncles I’d have today without my grandparents’ difficult early transition,” Vance writes. Isolated in suburban Middletown, far from her Kentucky kin, Bonnie was deeply unhappy. “Mamaw had little help when the children were young,” Vance explains. “Decades later, she would remember how isolated she felt.” Their home descended into chaos; Bonnie began hoarding. In one violent episode, she cracked Jim’s skull with a vase. In another, she set him on fire—an act extinguished by one of their children, then just eleven years old.

Raised amid this turmoil, Vance’s mother, Bev, replicated the cycle of instability—raising her own children in an environment of drugs, violence, and a rotating cast of men. Yet by Vance’s childhood, Jim had quit drinking, and he and Bonnie achieved a tense but stable coexistence. For young J.D., his grandparents became a refuge from his mother’s erratic behavior and ever-shifting household. He dedicates Hillbilly Elegy to them, calling them “without question or qualification, the best things that ever happened to me.” Years later, in his speech accepting the Republican vice-presidential nomination, Vance honored Bonnie as “a guardian angel by my side.” He even joked about her nineteen loaded handguns stashed around the house—a detail likely meant to underscore his pro-gun stance. “That’s who we fight for, that’s the American spirit,” he declared.

Vance acknowledges in his memoir that his grandparents “may have failed Bev in her youth,” but insists they “spent the rest of their lives making up for it.” He seems to extend the same hope of redemption to his mother, proudly introducing her at the RNC as “ten years clean and sober.” While his anger toward Bev is palpable in the book, he also recognizes their shared inheritance of generational trauma. Yet in one crucial way, Bev diverged from her parents: unlike Mamaw and Papaw, she did not stay married. This distinction, Vance implies, underscores his own political convictions—and why he casts his grandparents, despite their flaws, as the heroes of his against-all-odds success story.

Vance’s vision for America appears to tie civic participation and societal value to marriage and parenthood. He has praised Hungary’s far-right leader, Viktor Orbán, for policies incentivizing family formation—such as forgiving loans for couples who have children. “Why can’t we do that here?” Vance asked during his 2021 Senate campaign. He has even suggested that parents should wield greater political influence than the childless. “When you go to the polls in this country, as a parent, you should have more power,” he argued.

For Vance, fertility is a partisan issue. He has derided the “childless left,” claiming they lack a “physical commitment to the future.” In a conversation with Tucker Carlson, he dismissed U.S. leadership as “a bunch of childless cat ladies” determined to spread their misery. Among his targets was Kamala Harris—now the Democratic presidential nominee—whom he implied was disqualified from governance due to her lack of biological children. (Vance isn’t alone in this view; after Biden withdrew from the race, conservative commentator Will Chamberlain posted that Harris’s childlessness was a “simple, underdiscussed reason” she shouldn’t be president.)