Originally Authored at TheFederalist.com
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, who was recently exposed for lying about his military service, is at the center of another controversy — this time about the circumstances surrounding the conception of his two children.
Ever since he was named Vice President Kamala Harris’ running mate, Walz’s alleged experience with in vitro fertilization has become a prominent and pivotal talking point.
He told rallygoers in Philadelphia the night that he accepted the VP nomination that IVF is “personal for me and my family.”
Mere days later, Walz claimed that “if it was up to [J.D. Vance], I wouldn’t have a family because of IVF. …”
Even before Walz became a player in the 2024 presidential election, the Democrat explicitly linked himself and his family-building experience to IVF. His deception dates back as far as 2017, when he served as ranking Democrat on the House Veterans Affairs Committee.
“Gwen and I have two beautiful children because of reproductive health care like IVF,” he wrote on Facebook in February. “This issue is deeply personal to our family and so many others.”
During his State of the State address in March, Walz criticized the Alabama Supreme Court’s ruling that embryos are protected under the state’s Wrongful Death of a Minor Act.
“What those judges did was a direct attack on my family. My children,” he said.
Walz’s gubernatorial reelection campaign even fundraised off campaign mailers that further declared “My wife and I used I.V.F. to start a family.”
The New York Times and other corporate media did not fact-check Walz’s claims. Instead, outlets such as NYT, The Associated Press, and The Minnesota Star Tribune took the Democrat’s word for it because he came across, as NYT put it, as a “powerful messenger for the Democratic Party on a difficult issue for Republican leaders.”
It wasn’t until years into his governorship and weeks into his role as Democrats’ 2024 vice presidential nominee that the propagandists running the nation’s newsrooms bothered to seek clarification about Walz’s IVF comments from the Harris-Walz campaign. Sure enough, Walz and his wife, Gwen, admitted that they relied on intrauterine insemination (IUI) to have their two children, not IVF.
IUI is technically a form of assisted reproductive technology, but it is completely different than morally and ethically marred practices like IVF because it does not involve serially creating or destroying embryos outside of the womb. Instead, IUI involves manually placing sperm in the uterus during ovulation to increase the chances of conception.
NYT suggested Walz might have merely mixed up the terms after “entering a world of dizzying and occasionally awkward medical terminology.”
“Some patients say they are ‘doing I.V.F.’ as a catchall phrase for a wide range of fertility treatments,” NYT argued. “Mr. Walz has said that he and his wife spent seven years trying to have children.”
This excuse was directly regurgitated by Harris-Walz campaign spokeswoman Mia Ehrenberg, who told NYT that “Governor Walz talks how normal people talk” and was simply “using commonly understood shorthand for fertility treatments.”
Walz’s attempt to pass off his experience with a practice that mimics natural conception as one that involves manufacturing big batches of embryos that will likely be graded, discarded, or abandoned in freezers, however, was clearly a political move.
Contrary to both Democrat and Republican claims, no state has seriously considered banning either IUI or IVF. In fact, in the wake of the Alabama Supreme Court’s acknowledgment that embryos are human life, not property, several legislatures across the U.S. actively worked to further solidify the serial creation and destruction of embryos as a practice immune to recourse in their state.
Yet, Democrats including Walz have lumped immunity for Big Fertility and IVF into the party’s radical quest to codify unlimited abortion through all nine months of pregnancy.
Pro-lifers’ fundamental opposition to the destruction of human life, either through discard or dismemberment, hasn’t changed since the beginning of the movement. Democrats’ position on both abortion and ART, however, has quickly devolved into an extremism that elevates profit and convenience at the expense of women’s and children’s safety and lives.
They do this with the help of corporate media like the NYT, which pretends pro-lifers wanting to protect babies starting at conception is radical but Democrats’ deliberate deceptions about IVF and abortion can be rationalized. The media’s latest attempt to wave off yet another one of Walz’s lies is only happening because that lie is convenient to the Democrats’ 2024 political strategy.
Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on X @jordanboydtx.