Yahoo News Fact Check: Yes, JD Vance Said 'Car Seat Rules' Are Causing Americans To Have Fewer Kids
Claim:
JD Vance said "car seat rules" are causing Americans to have fewer kids.
Rating:
Context:
The comment originated from a March 2023 U.S. congressional hearing. The remark appeared to reference a research paper from 2020 titled, "Car Seats as Contraception."
A video shared on social media in September 2024 claims to show U.S. Sen. JD Vance of Ohio — former President Donald Trump's running mate in the 2024 presidential election — saying American parents aren't having more children because of "car seat rules."
For example, on Sept. 20, TikTok user @whattheactualkaren posted (archived) the video showing Vance making the "car seat rules" remark with the caption, "JD Vance. American Families aren't having children because of car seat laws. Seriously."
Numerous social media users across platforms including Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, Threads, TikTok and X also shared the video. Many of those posts displayed the watermark for @whattheactualkaren's upload of the clip.
The video showed Vance saying the following:
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. 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, and I encourage your organization to do that.
It's true that Vance genuinely made this remark during a March 23, 2023, hearing held by the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee in Washington. The hearing's purpose centered on "Enhancing Consumer Protections and Connectivity in Air Transportation."
During Vance's time to speak, he shared his thoughts regarding the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA union's proposal of enacting new Federal Aviation Administration mandates requiring children under the age of 2 to be restrained in special seats during flights. After that, he said the words appearing in the September 2024 video posts.
The Governors Highway Safety Association's website hosts a page displaying all states' laws of restraining children in car seats while riding in motor vehicles. Meanwhile, the FAA website published safety information about flying with young children, "strongly [urging]" — not mandating — that parents place infants and toddlers under the age of two in "an approved child restraint system (CRS) or device," and not in their laps.
As for Vance's comment referencing birth rates in the U.S., The Associated Press reported figures dropped in 2020 to "the lowest point since federal health officials started tracking it more than a century ago."
We emailed a spokesperson for Vance's campaign asking about the comment but did not receive a response prior to the publication of this story.
Vance's Complete Remarks and Full Video
The longer video of the committee hearing revealed Vance was having an exchange with Sara Nelson, the international president of the Associated of Flight Attendants-CWA, AFL-CIO. This transcription begins at the 1:45:08 mark in the complete video (emphasis ours):
VANCE: The one thing that I'd encourage your organization to do is maybe to think out how to… look, I don't think this is the right rule but if you guys are going to advocate for this rule, maybe to fit it in with some other changes that would make things easier on parents as you're advocating for that particular approach, because, here's the thing. I mean, the difference, of course, between an automobile leaving the hospital [with an infant] and [bringing an infant on] an airplane, there are two obvious ones that I could think of, right? One is that, look, if I take my kids from Cincinnati to visit their grandparents in San Diego, that's five hours. I mean, try to keep a toddler or a baby in a car seat for five hours. That is torture for everybody, including the baby and certainly the passengers around the baby.
But the second thing, of course, is that air traffic accidents are thankfully, thank God, so much less frequent and less common than car accidents are. And so, what I worry here is that in the name of safety improvements, and I don't doubt that there are marginal safety improvements, we're actually proposing a change that would make things much, much more miserable for parents for very little marginal improvement in safety.
And I want to, just one final comment here and then I'll shut up. One thing that I really worry about, and I think both Democrats and Republicans should worry about, is we have some real demographic problems in our country. 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. 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, and I encourage your organization to do that.
NELSON: Thank you, I appreciate that. I just want to clarify one point, and that is that the child would [only] be required to stay in the seat for the critical phases of flight. So this is not keeping babies in a seat for five hours.
VANCE: Thank God.
NELSON: [laughing] All right, thank you.
Possible Inspiration for Vance's Quote
Vance's remark about "American families aren't having enough children" and "car seat rules" possibly stemmed from a 2020 preprint research paper about how parents view car seats, considering their price and other factors. Jordan Nickerson, an associate professor of finance at the University of Washington, and David Solomon, a finance professor at Boston College, authored the paper, which has been peer-reviewed and will be published in the Journal of Law and Economics.
At least two users on social media made a connection between the paper and comment by Vance. One of them, a user on X, posted, "'Car seats as contraceptive' rhetoric from JD Vance likely stems from this 2020 finance bro paper."
According to the paper, the research involved looking at states' child car seat laws, U.S. Census Bureau data and car crash data. One of the paper's driving points was the fact that child safety car seats are expensive and that more than two car seats or booster seats don't always easily fit in the back seats of many motor vehicles. The first page also claimed car safety seat laws for children prevented 145,000 births since 1980 — an assertion that roughly matches the comment by Vance.
Page 12 of the paper noted the authors were not arguing that car seat regulations were the primary reason for declining birth rates. The authors wrote:
While we do not claim that car seat laws are the primary driver of the secular trend, it is a useful sanity check as to whether the introduction of the laws seems roughly consistent with the declines we observe, which became prominent in the mid-2000s. On the face of it, the introduction of the laws in the 1980s appears somewhat at odds with this, occurring during a period of somewhat rising birth rates.
The authors also noted later:
Anecdotally, it is rare to find people who will openly state that car seats concretely stopped them having a third child. But it is quite common to find people who cite car seats as being a pain and a hassle that they had to deal with, especially in the context of having a third child.
The conclusion of the paper appeared to advocate for "easing" safety restrictions for car seats "to increase birthrates":
Child car seat laws reduce fertility by restricting the choice set among women who, at the margin, would like to have another child. Easing such restrictions is not only likely to increase birthrates, but unlike many fertility-increasing policies, does not cost the government anything.
Sources:
Blanco, Evie. "Flight Attendants Support Enforcing the Ban of Lap Children on Airplanes." Miami Herald, 24 Mar. 2023, https://www.miamiherald.com/detour/article273547000.html.
"Cars, Kids, and Unintended Costs." United States Joint Economic Committee, 5 Oct. 2020, https://www.jec.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/republicans/2020/10/cars-kids-and-unintended-costs.
"Child Passenger Safety." Governors Highway Safety Association, https://www.ghsa.org/state-laws/issues/child%20passenger%20safety. Accessed 25 Sept. 2024.
C-SPAN.org | National Politics | History | Nonfiction Books. https://www.c-span.org/.
"Enhancing Consumer Protections and Connectivity in Air Transportation." U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, & Transportation, 23 Mar. 2023, https://www.commerce.senate.gov/2023/3/enhancing-consumer-protections-and-connectivity-in-air-transportation.
"Flying with Children." Federal Aviation Administration, https://www.faa.gov/travelers/fly_children.
"Historical Newspapers from the 1700's-2000s." Newspapers.com, https://www.newspapers.com/.
Nickerson, Jordan, and David H. Solomon. Car Seats as Contraception. 3665046, 31 July 2020. Social Science Research Network, https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3665046.
"Senate Hearing Transcripts." Congress.gov, https://www.congress.gov/senate-hearing-transcripts.
Stobbe, Mike. "US Birth Rate Falls to Lowest Point in More than a Century." The Associated Press, 5 May 2021, https://apnews.com/article/birth-rates-science-coronavirus-pandemic-health-d51571bda4aa02eafdd42265912f1202.
"TV News Archive." Internet Archive, https://archive.org/details/tv.
Updates:
Sept. 27, 2024: This article was corrected to note that the Nickerson study has been peer-reviewed and is soon to be published in the Journal of Law and Economics.
