(The Hill) — Usha Vance, the wife of vice presidential hopeful Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), addressed the wave of criticism over his resurfaced comments saying the country was being run by “childless cat ladies.”

In a prerecorded interview with Ainsley Earhardt that aired on “Fox and Friends” Monday morning, Vance said her husband “would never ever, ever want to say something to hurt someone who was trying to have a family.”

Usha Vance, in her first solo interview since Vance joined the Republican ticket, blamed “people” for focusing on the quip rather than the substantive point Vance was trying to make.

“I took a moment to look and actually see what he had said and tried to understand what the context was and all that, which is something that I really wish people would do a little bit more often,” she said.

Vance added she hoped people would spend less time focusing on this “three-word phrase,” because what he was “really saying is that it can be really hard to be a parent in this country, and sometimes our policies are designed in a way that make it even harder.”

She said not being able to have children is “challenging” and “never, ever anything that anyone would want to mock or make fun of.”

Former President Trump’s running mate has faced a firestorm over comments he made in 2021 when he was campaigning for an Ohio Senate seat.

He told then-Fox News host Tucker Carlson the country was being run by “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.”

“It’s just a basic fact — you look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC [Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez] — the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children,” Vance said. “And how does it make any sense that we’ve turned our country over to people who don’t really have a direct stake in it?”

In a clip of Vance’s full remarks from 2021, the Ohio senator spoke about the difficulties some people face in having kids and said his comments were not about them.

“A lot of people are unable to have kids for very complicated and important reasons. … There are people, of course, for biological reasons, medical reasons, that can’t have children. The target of these remarks is not them,” Vance said at the time.

However since his comments resurfaced, Democrats and the Harris campaign have used them against him. He defended his comments in an interview with SiriusXM’s “The Megyn Kelly Show,” calling it a “sarcastic comment” and pivoting to attack Democrats as “antifamily.”