In early September 2025, a claim circulated on social media that U.S. Vice President JD Vance suggested Labor Day should be a celebration of "women who go through labor."
One post (archived) on Threads spread the rumor with an image that read:
WASHINGTON-JD Vance stirred controversy on Monday by suggesting that Labor Day be a celebration of "women who go through labor."
"The woke mob has distorted the true meaning of Labor Day," Vance told Fox News "Honoring workers might please people who work for a living, but it doesn't delight me and Donald Trump."
Vance urged that Labor Day be "a time to pay tribute to the one thing that gives women's lives meaning: reproducing."
"Only women who have given birth should be allowed at Labor Day picnics," he declared. "No baby, no hot dog."
(Threads user @the_bad_girl_from_the_tree)
The user added the caption, "No baby, no hot dog," referring to the final section of the text.
The rumor also spread on Facebook, Threads, X and Instagram.
Some readers seemed to interpret the rumor as a factual recounting of real-life events and turned to Snopes' website to verify whether it was true.
However, there was no evidence to substantiate the rumor that Vance shared this sentiment. A Google search revealed no reports from reputable news organizations about the alleged statement. Given the prominence of a U.S. vice president, major media outlets would have widely reported this statement.
Rather, the story was created by Andy Borowitz, a comedian and satirist known for creating the satirical publication The Borowitz Report, which he's been publishing online since 2001. The site's about page reads, in part:
I've been writing satirical news since I was eighteen. This represents either commitment to a genre or arrested development.
In high school, I became editor of the newspaper solely because it produced an annual April Fool's issue. Later, as president of The Harvard Lampoon, I published parodies of the college newspaper, which got me hauled into the office of Dean Archie C. Epps III, which was his actual name.
For the next two decades, I took a break from news satire while I waited for the Internet to be invented. Then, in 2001, I started emailing made-up news stories to friends. One suggested that creating a "website" would make it easier to "blast" my "posts." Soon, The Borowitz Report was live at BorowitzReport.com, and my free newsletter was reaching untold dozens of people.
In a Sept. 1, 2025, Facebook post (archived) that originated the rumor, Borowitz wrote:
WASHINGTON—JD Vance stirred controversy on Monday by suggesting that Labor Day be a celebration of "women who go through labor."
"The woke mob has distorted the true meaning of Labor Day," Vance told Fox News "Honoring workers might please people who work for a living, but it doesn't delight me and Donald Trump."
Vance urged that Labor Day be "a time to pay tribute to the one thing that gives women's lives meaning: reproducing."
"Only women who have given birth should be allowed at Labor Day picnics," he declared. "No baby, no hot dog."
The image featured in the post was from a January 2025 Fox News interview with Vance. At no point in that interview did Vance mention Labor Day.
The Borowitz Report published a nearly identical story titled "JD Vance Says Labor Day Should Celebrate Women who go Through Labor" in September 2024, which likely served as the basis for the 2025 version. It started:
LANSING (The Borowitz Report)—JD Vance stirred controversy on Monday by suggesting that Labor Day be a celebration of "women who go through labor."
"The woke mob has distorted the true meaning of Labor Day," Vance told supporters in Michigan. "Honoring workers might please people who work for a living, but it doesn't delight me [...]
The full version of that article was available only to paid subscribers.
We investigated similar rumors involving Vance in the past, including a claim that he said women in violent marriages should not get divorced and a rumor he once agreed with a podcast host who claimed having grandmothers help raise children is "the whole purpose of the postmenopausal female." Snopes also has addressed multiple satirical claims from The Borowitz Report in the past.
For background, here is why we alert readers to rumors created by sources that call their output humorous or satirical.