In a recent article published on Mercator, the editor, Michael Cook, expressed his deep concern about the aging populations in Western democracies and their low birth-rates resulting in falling populations. He used a phrase, “childless cat ladies” as an illustration of a cause of this demographic collapse. J.D. Vance, Donald Trump’s running mate for Vice-President in the upcoming US election, had also used this “reasoning”, but as a cause of a much wider collection of woes. He proposed that our societies’ problems were due to “childless cat ladies” preferring cats to babies.

As a “childless, crazy cat lady” myself, I was shocked by Michael’s use. My first reaction was to feel hurt and then sad, then angry – the only saving grace was that Michael left out the word “crazy”, which often appears before cat.

This denigrating designation has a very long history as misogynist and was used, for example, to justify persecuting women as witches, whose cats were thought to have special powers for evil and to be associated with the Devil. It is also discriminatory – are there “childless, crazy cat gentleman”? And what about childless men who have a beloved pet dog – are they “childless, crazy dog gentleman”?

As well, in some cultures, childlessness is a ground for divorce, but only men have the right to divorce and it is a simple procedure. Women must have their husband’s consent. I have been told of men who have divorced three consecutive wives on the ground they were infertile, that is, in all three cases the woman was blamed for the infertility, because it is unthinkable in these cultures that a man would be infertile.

Women were not only blamed for not having children, in certain circumstances, they were punished for having them, while the fathers went unscathed. Young, unmarried servant women who became pregnant were treated as pariahs and dealt with very harshly, while the privileged young men who fathered the child were excused as “needing to sow their wild oats” and sent off to the colonies for a time. In short, the man could abandon his child with impunity, the woman could not.

Many years ago, I speculated in a law journal article that this difference was because society needed women to carry the value that mothers automatically bonded to their children in order to prevent the child becoming a burden on society. This is not to deny that mothers do naturally bond to their children. One reason surrogate motherhood is controversial is that a woman planning to become pregnant in order to give away the child to whom she gives birth, challenges that value.

In many cases, small domestic animals have a health and well-being function – for example, patting a cat reduces blood pressure. Palliative care services and old age homes are using “pet therapy”, as are prisons, all with very positive and promising results.

Other benefits could include that having a pet prevents a person committing suicide, because they worry who would look after the cat or dog when they were dead. And what about war veterans suffering from PTSD for whom a lick and a paw can make them feel life is still worth living?

Or the animal helps a person with disabilities? Or its presence makes everyone kinder to each other, as in a class I taught? I had a student with quadriplegia who brought his black Labrador assistance dog to my medical law and ethics class. With his owner’s permission, many of the students interacted with the dog. At convocation, the dog walked across the stage beside the student in his wheelchair and graduated with the student with an honorary law degree.

My father loved animals and had great respect for them. My Siamese cat Shah used to sit on the gatepost waiting for my Dad to come home. Dad would stop and rub Shah’s ears – he called it “doing his ears” – while he spoke softly to him. Dad explained to me that he told the cat all the difficulties of his day, so that when he entered the house, where my mother was waiting to give him a kiss, those problems no longer preoccupied him.

I am a fan of Pope Francis, but, with all respect, I think he made a bad mistake recently. He refused to bless a small dog brought to the St Peter’s Square general weekly audience when the dog’s owner held it up. Perhaps he was concerned that doing so would equate it to the babies, who were being presented for blessing. I would have liked to remind him of his own saying, one that I use often, “They too [animals] are God’s creatures”. I can imagine how rejected and hurt the woman who held up that little dog felt. We should all want to reduce suffering and certainly not inflict it.  Perhaps, Francis had forgotten CS Lewis’s suggestion in The Problem of Pain, that we have dogs in heaven, because they are capable of friendship. I am sure same is true of cat companions.