JD Vance, the Republican Vice Presidential candidate, already blamed Kamala Harris for the Ram 1500 Basic’s loss of life earlier this 12 months. He’s now below hearth for much more absurd feedback made throughout a Senate committee listening to in March 2023. The junior U.S. Senator from Ohio stated that authorities automotive seat mandates have considerably lowered the nation’s start charge.
Vance confusingly swerved onto the subject of automotive seats throughout a listening to on airline shopper protections, in response to the New York Occasions. We might by no means know exactly why Vance has a prejudice in opposition to childless girls, bordering on existential worry, however we all know he stated:
One factor that I actually fear about, and I believe each Democrats and Republicans ought to fear about, is we’ve some actual demographic issues in our nation. American households aren’t having sufficient kids. And I believe there’s proof that a number of the issues that we’re doing to folks is driving down the variety of kids that American households are having. Specifically, there’s proof that the car-seat guidelines that we’ve imposed — which, after all, I need children to drive in automotive seats — have pushed down the variety of infants born on this nation by over 100,000.
First, Vance is mistaken. He claims there’s proof to help this declare. The little proof there may be primarily factors to automotive seats because the symptom of a lot bigger forces at play. To paraphrase James Carville, “It’s the economic system, silly.” A 2020 analysis paper, “Automotive Seats as Contraception,” revealed in the Journal of Regulation and Economics, explored the subject. The paper crudely calculated that automotive seat mandates lowered the annual chance of a lady giving start to a 3rd youngster by 0.73 %.
The takeaway needs to be that folks aren’t having extra children due to the monetary burden for the typical family, not as a result of they’ve to purchase a automotive seat. Sure, the paper estimated there have been 145,000 fewer births since 1980. Nevertheless, loosening the legal guidelines round automotive seats would simply kill kids, as our understanding of kids’s security in vehicles has grown by leaps and bounds since then.
