Melinda Henneberger: In praise of childless women I know who make this a better world | Opinion

The repeated recent jabs at childless women as somehow less than — with less of a stake in the republic, according to Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance, and less humility, according to Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders — strike me as not only cruel, but puzzling.

Because doesn’t everyone have a favorite aunt or teacher or friend whose care for other people’s children puts the lie to this nonsense?

My husband and I have two grown children. But in response to this insulting drivel, I would like to tell you about just a few of the women I know personally who don’t happen to have any — and do happen to be getting up every day and making a difference for all of our kids.

First, my friend Kathy Saile, California director of the non-profit No Kid Hungry. She worked so hard to make that state the first in the country to offer free breakfast and lunch to all school kids.

This summer, she helped get the word out about SUN Bucks, the new federal grocery benefit program. Families with eligible school-aged children could get $120 per child to buy groceries. Which makes an especially big difference when food prices are high and not everyone can make it to summer school programs. No Kid Hungry’s completely achievable goal is to end childhood hunger in the richest country in the world.

So what’s her stake in America? As big as anybody’s, of course.

Then there’s my friend Mary Meg McCarthy, a lawyer and executive director of the Heartland Alliance’s National Immigrant Justice Center in Chicago, which provides counsel and representation to some 10,000 low-income immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers each year.

Demonized as they have become, asylum seekers are politically persecuted refugees who need and deserve our help. Mary Meg’s major push these days is for access to asylum, which though guaranteed by both domestic and international law is brutally hard to come by now that the border is effectively closed. These days, asylum applications are only being taken through a lottery. What she asks those who have fallen for anti-immigrant rhetoric is, “Who is caring for your elderly parents right now?”

Joyce Hackett, who lives in Western Massachusetts, started an organization called ‘Lift Every Vote,’ a nonpartisan, national voting rights organization, in 2016. The group’s first project was automatic voter registration in Massachusetts. Currently, Joyce is designing free lessons, already being used in six states, that help high school teachers help their students register. Ahead of the November election, she is putting in 14-hour days for the republic.

“I see elections as a moment of communion,” she says. Joyce feels that while “having kids can make you aware of their vulnerability, not having children in a child-centric culture” can also help you empathize with the marginalized. Which makes a lot of sense to me.

Another of my heroines is Kathryn Lopez, a writer for National Review. If they gave Nobels for kindness, you would have heard of her, but as it is, you probably don’t know that this amazing person spends her time, all on her own, checking in with homeless New Yorkers and others in trouble, seeing what they need and then rounding up prayers and whatever else for them.

Kathryn is a strong conservative, and for all I know she may love J.D. Vance. In fact, since she loves everyone, I find this likely. But regardless, I still take exception to his remarks about the childless on her behalf and that of so many other truly selfless women without kids — again, just among those women I happen to know.

Yet another such person is Tracey Knickerbocker, someone I wrote a long profile of for the Sacramento Bee two years ago. Tracey was a homeless meth addict who not only got herself clean but works saving the lives of others who are now where she once was. I’ve been out with Tracey doing her thing, and what she both is and does is just stunning to behold.

Then there’s the whole category of religious sisters doing great things for God and all of us, like my old friend Sister Sheila Brosnan, of the Sisters of Charity of New York. Sheila, who for years has been part of her order’s leadership team, was previously a teacher, missionary, nurse, and nursing supervisor at the now-shuttered St. Vincent’s Hospital back when they were caring for indigent AIDS patients when no one else would.

My University of Notre Dame classmate Mary Ellen Woods, who died recently, quite unexpectedly, had no children, either. But through the Notre Dame Club of Chicago Scholarship Foundation, to which she devoted considerable time and love for more than 30 years, she mentored who knows how many young people.

She tried so hard to get help for a seriously mentally ill classmate of ours who died homeless despite her best efforts, and roped all of us who knew her into helping her many projects and charities, too, in various ways. In fact, she so embodied everything that Our Lady’s university is supposed to be that she is going to be buried on campus.

Likewise, my Notre Dame professor and lifelong friend Liz Christman, who died in 2010, also had no children of her own but did nothing but teach and throw a blanket of wisdom and care over everybody else’s.

After being left at the altar — literally, she always said — she joined the WAVES during World War II, then spent more than 20 years at Harold Ober Associates, a New York literary agency that represented J.D. Salinger, Agatha Christie and William Faulkner. In her 50s, Liz went back to school and got her PhD from NYU, in hopes of helping some of the young idealists trying to change the world better communicate their ideas. She not only did that, but told us what we needed to hear, at least in my case on everything from what not to worry about to which guys she deemed “too silly” for me.

I have many other friends who live lives of great purpose without ever having given birth, and all of you disrespecting them for political gain, as a way to demean Kamala Harris, owe them the most abject possible apology.

All of the wonderful women I’ve named except Joyce Hackett happen to be Catholic. As J.D. Vance is, so I’m doubly perplexed that he doesn’t know better, and has been talking like this for years. But whatever your beliefs, and in whatever corner of the country you call home, I’ll bet that you have a list like this, too.

We are so pulled apart already, let’s not let this be one more unnecessary gulf between us.