Tim Walz is a new kind of reproductive rights messenger
By Jeongyoon Han
Published August 27, 2024 at 9:24 AM CDT
Advocates for reproductive rights have a new champion: Tim Walz, the Democratic vice presidential nominee.
The Minnesota governor cemented that role for himself when, on Night 3 of the DNC, he highlighted his work on reproductive rights — and how the issue is personal for him.
Walz, a father of two, repeated what’s now a familiar story about how he and his wife, Gwen, struggled to conceive.
“Even if you’ve never experienced the hell of infertility, I guarantee you know somebody who has,” Walz said last week. “I remember praying each night for a call with good news, the pit in my stomach when the phone would ring, and the agony when we heard the treatments hadn’t worked.”
Walz said it took years until he and his wife welcomed their first child, a daughter, whom they named Hope, into the family.
“I’m letting you in on how we started our family because that’s a big part of what this election is about: freedom,” Walz said.
People in politics on both sides of the aisle have shared their experiences with infertility, like Michelle Obama and Mike Pence, who both wrote about their family’s obstacles in their respective books, Becoming and So Help Me God.
But men have not been as open about the subject on the campaign trail in the way Walz has.
“For a long time, there’s been a stigma around having fertility issues,” said Sean Tipton, chief advocacy and policy officer for the American Society for Reproductive Medicine. “For some strange reason, reproduction has long been considered a woman’s issue. … So nobody wanted to talk much about it, let alone men and let alone men in the public eye, or men who were expected to meet some certain model of what it meant to be a man.”
Yet it was Walz — introduced to the crowd that night by some of his former high school football players — who displayed emotional vulnerability over his family’s infertility difficulties.
“You couldn’t signal any more strongly, ‘Hey, this is a masculine guy,’ and then he’s talking about not only what his family means [to him], but how hard it was to get that family and, and he said that in such an open and honest way,” Tipton said. “The fact that you have somebody vying for the second most powerful job available to a politician — as a man — talking about the challenges he faced in building his family? It’s a big deal.”
The Walz’s fertility treatments involved a common procedure — but not IVF
Democrats have made reproductive rights, particularly abortion access, a major part of their campaign. And when President Biden was still in the presidential race, Vice President Harris did the heavy lifting on messaging around abortion — especially after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022.
Now, the second slot on the ticket is Walz, who is openly talking about this other part of reproductive care. While Walz said in February that the procedure his family used wasn’t in vitro fertilization (IVF), he erroneously described the treatments as such on other occasions. IVF is the external creation of an embryo that is then inserted into the uterus. The procedure faces opposition from anti-abortion activists because it frequently involves discarding excess embryos. The procedure Walz and his wife used was intrauterine insemination (IUI), which is the insemination of sperm cells directly into the uterus.
In an interview with Glamour last week, Gwen clarified, saying the family’s “infertility journey was an incredibly personal and difficult experience” which they at first decided to only keep “largely to ourselves.” But, she said, a neighbor — who is a nurse — helped Gwen “with the shots I needed as part of the IUI process.”
Mia Ehrenberg, a spokesperson for the Harris-Walz campaign, said Walz was “using commonly understood shorthand for fertility treatments.”
Walz has since stated that the family had used fertility treatments — and Mini Timmaraju, president of Reproductive Freedom for All, said it matters that Walz is talking about the subject at all.
“I’m just thrilled to have him and Gwen out there talking about this, connecting the dots, and really giving permission in some way to other men to say, ‘This is you. You’re part of the story too,’ ” Timmaraju said at a panel on abortion rights during the DNC.
Republicans face pressure to clarify stance on reproductive rights
According to a recent poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, about 6 in 10 U.S. adults support protecting access to IVF, while about 4 in 10 adults expressed a neutral opinion on banning the destruction of embryos made through IVF. Additional polling from the AP-NORC found that support for legal abortion for any reason has gone up by about 12% in the last three years; 61% of adults in the poll said they want their state to allow abortion for any reason. Polling from NPR/PBS News/Marist shows that Americans almost unanimously reject criminalizing abortion.
After the Alabama Supreme Court made a ruling in February that raised questions about access to in vitro fertilization (IVF), Republican leaders have faced greater pressure to clarify how they draw the line between abortion rights – which they largely oppose – and access to reproductive care more broadly, like infertility treatments.
More Democratic men are becoming vocal about reproductive freedom, and that’s pushing a predominantly male-led Republican party to figure out their answer as Election Day draws near.
“The issue of access to fertility care was already putting pressure on Republicans,” Tipton said. “They don’t want to be on the wrong side of that issue. But they have to show that support in ways that isn’t going to alienate some of their anti-choice constituency, who seem to want to see this issue as something that they should be against.”
When Josh Zurawski joined his wife, Amanda, to share how an abortion ban in Texas nearly threatened her life, he said, “I’m here tonight because the fight for reproductive rights is not just a women’s issue. This is about fighting for our families.”
Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear shaped his entire DNC speech on reproductive freedom, and called out former President Donald Trump for saying he was “able to kill Roe v. Wade” because of his key role in selecting the Supreme Court justices who overturned the case.
“That’s why we must tear away any chance he can ever be president, ever again,” Beshear said.
The task for Republicans to clarify their stance on these issues may be difficult to sort out: Most every Senate Republican — including Ohio Sen. JD Vance — blocked legislation that would have made it a right nationwide for women to access fertility treatments, including IVF, in June.
And while many Republicans came out in support of IVF in the aftermath of the Alabama Supreme Court ruling, more than 100 House Republicans have cosponsored the Life at Conception Act, which defines a “human being” to include “the moment of fertilization.” The legislation also does not have provisions for IVF — so access to it is not guaranteed.
That, Tipton said, is hard to square with support for IVF.
“I’m going to be interested to see in the remaining time of this campaign how Republicans meet this challenge of showing their support for family-building medical care,” Tipton said. “If they think they want to win this election, they’re going to have to solve that problem of how to talk about it.”
Trump and Vance seem to be trying to rebrand campaign’s stance on reproductive care
Trump appears to be recalibrating his stance on reproductive rights — in the hopes that that Republicans follow suit. He was one of the first in his party to come out in support of IVF in the days following the Alabama ruling, and recently posted this on Truth Social, without specifying details: “My Administration will be great for women and their reproductive rights,” he wrote on Friday.
Trump’s running mate, Vance — who once praised the Supreme Court for overturning Roe — claimed that Trump has “explicitly” said he’d veto any abortion bans. And, for the first time in 40 years, the Republican National Committee dropped the call for a national abortion ban from the party platform and instead pushed for a state-by-state approach, as Trump has come to support in recent months. Meanwhile, bipartisan support has emerged for a bill that would ensure coverage for infertility treatment.
Tipton said while Republicans figure out their messaging, fertility treatments will become a larger part of the national conversation over reproductive rights because of Walz. And, Tipton added, Walz is creating a new mold of male leadership as he continues to share his family’s story on the campaign trail.
“We have to have a picture of masculinity that says, “Yes, you have problems and you have feelings and you deal with them and you deal with them without being an asshole. And that’s being masculine,’” Tipton said. “And so I hope that what Walz is doing changes the paradigm for how men are supposed to behave in this country.”