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When Alabama’s high court earlier this year ruled that frozen embryos are people, temporarily halting in vitro fertilization treatments at some clinics, Democrats turned it into political gold.
Tim Walz gives them an opportunity to do it again.
At a Tuesday rally in Philadelphia, the Minnesota governor for the first time on a national stage shared how he and his wife, Gwen, struggled to conceive. And by Wednesday, he had cemented the story as part of his stump speech.
“This is very personal for my wife and I,” Walz told a crowd of 12,000 in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. “When Gwen and I decided to have children, we went through years of fertility treatments. I remember each night praying that the call was going to come and it was going to be good news. The phone would ring, tenseness in my stomach, and then the agony when you heard the treatments hadn’t worked.”
That a 60-year-old man running to be vice president would share such an intimate anecdote on the campaign trail is a cue of how central reproductive health care has become in American politics and how much the electoral landscape has shifted in the two years since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.
Walz isn’t talking about IVF as a women’s issue that men should care about on behalf of their wives and daughters. He’s framing its importance as a man and a father, underscoring Democrats’ argument that men should care about reproductive health care because it affects them, too.
Walz’s story offers the Harris campaign a vehicle to drive home the point that former President Donald Trump is responsible for the fall of Roe and its ripple effects, from the near-total abortion bans in effect in more than a third of the country to the Alabama Supreme Court’s February ruling on IVF. It also opens a window for the campaign to needle Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, over his vote against advancing a Democratic-sponsored bill to establish a nationwide right to IVF and other fertility treatments.
“That we are here in 2024 and this may be an issue that helps to swing an election shows what a problem Republicans have in the family planning realm,” said Barrett Marson, a GOP strategist in Arizona.
After the Alabama decision, President Joe Biden used his State of the Union address to highlight an Alabama woman who had to pause her IVF treatment because of the state’s ruling, and called on Congress to guarantee a right to the procedure.
Trump and nearly all Republicans have stressed their support for IVF in recent months. But the most socially conservative portion of their base, including members of the Southern Baptist Convention, has serious religious and ethical concerns with IVF as currently practiced in the U.S. and has been pushing lawmakers to see the issue more like they do abortion.
Democrats have used abortion to help secure victories in key gubernatorial, Senate and state legislative races for the last two years, and Republican strategists say IVF is another — and even more popular — arrow in their reproductive health care quiver.
Polling shows that IVF remains broadly popular across the political spectrum. A July AP-NORC poll found that about three-quarters of Democrats and 56 percent of Republicans favor preserving access to the procedure. And data from the Pew Research Center released last fall show that four in 10 adults in the U.S. have used or know someone who has used fertility treatments, up from 33 percent five years earlier, as the average age women give birth here continues to rise.
Republicans have spent much of the last several months assuring voters that they do, in fact, support IVF. After the Alabama court’s decision resulted in clinics suspending IVF services over legal uncertainties, the state’s GOP legislature quickly passed legislation to let treatments resume. Trump, like many other Republican elected officials, voiced support for IVF, and the GOP platform approved last month specifically affirmed support for IVF and other fertility treatments.
Some Republican strategists argue those moves are enough to neutralize the issue of IVF on the campaign trail and that Walz’s personal story doesn’t make it any more salient.
“Republicans have made it clear that they support IVF — the vast majority of Republicans have. There’s no effort to roll back IVF,” said Mark Graul, a GOP strategist in Wisconsin. “I think it’s part of just the broader strategy to, from the Democratic perspective, put the spotlight on abortion as much as possible, this just being a piece of that puzzle.”
Senate Democrats in June forced a vote on legislation putting Republicans like Vance on the record opposing nationwide protections for IVF. While all but two Senate Republicans voted to block the legislation, saying it went too far, threatened religious freedom, or was unnecessary, most insist they support broad access to fertility treatments. And some are pushing alternative legislation sponsored by Sens. Katie Britt (R-Ala.) and Ted Cruz (R-Texas).
Walz, in a preview of what’s to come on the campaign, called out Vance in a July tweet on World IVF Day for “opposing the miracle of IVF,” saying it’s a “direct attack on my family and so many others.” Vance in a letter with other Senate Republicans has said he supports “continued nationwide access to IVF.”
“The preferred outcome of the next 90 days for Donald Trump and JD Vance is to never have to talk about this. But what is clear, last night and in the commitment that both Vice President Harris and Gov. Walz have, and in their personal connection to this, is that they’re not going to let the Republicans get away with that,” said Ryan Stitzlein, vice president of political and government relations at Reproductive Freedom for All. “They’re going to continue to bring this issue to them every single day between now and November.”
Anti-abortion groups are dismissing the appeal of Walz’s story. Kristan Hawkins, president of Students for Life Action, said that the Minnesota governor’s “abortion mindset taints” that story, pointing to the fact that his state was the first to enact statutory protections for abortion after the fall of Roe.
“All children need to be welcomed into the world. All children deserve hope and a future,” Hawkins said.
The challenge for Republicans is the anti-abortion movement, including Hawkins’ group, has made clear that securing personhood rights for fetuses and embryos is its next frontier, which has broad implications for IVF. Already, more than a third of states consider fetuses or embryos to be people at some point during pregnancy, a potential problem for fertility care given that clinics during the IVF process typically create more embryos than someone plans to implant, with the rest donated, stored or destroyed.
Many Republican-controlled legislatures continue to pursue legislation that gives embryos and fetuses the same rights as people at the moment of conception, which medical professionals argue could limit their ability to provide certain kinds of fertility treatments like IVF and open them up to liability for any accidental destruction of embryos. More than two dozen bills that the abortion-rights-focused Guttmacher Institute considers as establishing fetal personhood were this year introduced in state legislatures, though many were scuttled after the Alabama court decision gave lawmakers cold feet.
The Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest and most politically powerful Protestant denomination, voted in June to oppose IVF, signaling the beginnings of a conservative sea change on the issue.
And anti-abortion groups cheered the inclusion of 14th Amendment language in the Republican platform this year as a path to an eventual Supreme Court ruling they hope will say that life begins at conception and should be protected as such, something they have long pushed and hoped for.
“The RNC can say whatever it wants, or Trump can, and [Speaker Mike] Johnson — you can get them all on the same page, and then the South Carolina State House passes a bill, and all of a sudden, that drives the conversation,” said Douglas Heye, a GOP strategist. “You have state legislatures that are sort of legislating out loud, and make it very hard for the party, even on something like this, to have a cohesive message.”
