More People Should Be Talking About IVF the Way Tim Walz Is
Reproductive rights are almost always framed as a women’s issue. Walz reminds us that they affect men too.
Tim Walz tells a compelling story. The vice-presidential candidate grew up working on a family farm. He’s a former high-school teacher and football coach. As governor of Minnesota, he passed laws lowering the cost of insulin and providing free school breakfast and lunch. He’s also been talking about something more intimate, though, in a way that few politicians do. Walz and his wife had their daughter, Hope, using in vitro fertilization.
So many different kinds of families exist because of IVF. Walz understands, deeply, some small piece of what they’ve gone through. But his strength doesn’t just lie in the fact that he has experienced IVF; he could champion access to it regardless. What’s special is the way he’s sharing this part of himself. Reproductive rights are almost always framed as a women’s issue. Walz reminds us that they affect men too. As he said at a Philadelphia rally on Tuesday, “This gets personal.”
[Read: Abortion isn’t about feminism]
Walz is plainspoken when he describes the seven years he and his wife, Gwen, spent going through fertility treatments. “I remember praying every night for a call for good news, the pit in my stomach when the phone rang, and the agony when we heard that the treatments hadn’t worked,” he said at the Tuesday rally. On July 25, World IVF Day, he posted on X: “When Gwen and I were having trouble getting pregnant, the anxiety and frustration blotted out the sun.” Every time I read that metaphor, I get teary-eyed at the immensity of their pain, how it overwhelmed everything else.
I’m also struck by how central Walz is to these anecdotes. Men can be seen as peripheral to the IVF process, like their job is just to give sperm. And it is much more physically taxing to have to take medication to stimulate egg growth, undergo surgery to have those eggs collected, and then have another procedure to get an embryo implanted in you. But you’d hope that men are taking an active emotional role, and that they’re supporting whomever the embryo is placed in—whether that’s a partner or a surrogate. And of course, the end result will shape both partners’ future for a lifetime. Walz makes clear that he wasn’t just standing by his wife through all of this. When they got bad news, he was grieving; when she finally got pregnant, he also felt the wave of joy and relief. It’s his story too.
Walz’s human approach lies in stark contrast to that of Donald Trump’s VP pick, J. D. Vance, who voted in June to block legislation that would protect national access to IVF. In 2021, Vance called our Democratic leaders “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made.” As observers have pointed out, the comments were cruel to those who choose to not have children. But many childless adults do want kids badly; for some of them, IVF is the one remaining hope. When Walz speaks about his experience, he is representing those people—and not just the ladies.
The governor’s framing is important. At abortion-rights rallies, you’ll see a flood of similar slogans: My body, my choice; I’m not your incubator; Keep your rosaries off my ovaries. Attacks on reproductive rights are attacks on women’s bodily autonomy, after all. But these issues aren’t abstract to men. Access to contraception, abortion, fertility treatments, and pre- and postnatal care also matters for whole families. It matters for the couples who can’t afford to have another kid, for the gay men who’ve always dreamed of being dads, for the trans men who get pregnant, for all the loved ones of the women who have died in childbirth. It mattered for Walz.
He may not have gone through the hot flashes or the mood swings or the invasive procedures, and he may not have carried or given birth to Hope or his son, Gus. But IVF brought him his family, and now he’s advocating for other couples to get the same chance. That’s the real reason that all of this is so crucial: If only women are seen as gaining or losing reproductive rights, then only women will be expected to defend them. I’d rather more people understand what Walz does—that for any of us, it could get personal.
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