In just a few days, VP-candidate Tim Walz has thrown himself into the center of the ring on reproductive rights, spotlighting the fact that he and his wife used in vitro fertilization (IVF) to conceive their children. In his first public appearance since he was chosen as Kamala Harris’s running mate, the Minnesota governor told the world the deeply personal story about how he and his wife, Gwen, conceived their two children, Gus and Hope. He talked about the fear and agony he felt while waiting to see if the procedure worked, the pit in his stomach that formed, something that’s so hard to understand unless you’ve been through that dreaded wait. On World Fertility Day, Tim Walz even posted that when he and Gwen were having trouble getting pregnant, the anxiety and frustration seemed to blot out the sun. I know exactly what this feels like because I felt that darkness for so many years.
When I was going through IVF starting in 2017, I felt isolated, frustrated, and like a family-building-obsessed warrior in a wildly lonely battle. It was hard to think about anything but how badly I wanted to be a mother. My first pregnancy was bad luck, an ectopic that ultimately stretched my left fallopian tube until it burst. The fetus couldn’t survive. I experienced near-death internal bleeding and needed an emergency blood transfusion. This was my devastating introduction to loss and infertility.
I was left with one fallopian tube and instructions from my doctor to keep trying to get pregnant. What he didn’t warn me about was that I would go through multiple miscarriages and an unhelpful diagnosis of “unexplained infertility” before I met with a reproductive endocrinologist who recommended I pursue IVF. After seven pregnancies and a whole lot of loss, I’ve come out the other side with two living children.
Since my family-building journey started, I’ve increasingly seen public figures—from Amy Schumer to Megan Markle, Beyonce to Jennifer Aniston and even Chrissy Teigen—open up about loss and assisted fertility. Every time a celebrity shares their family building story, it normalizes this experience for the 1 in 8 couples in the United States who have trouble getting pregnant or sustaining a pregnancy.
Hearing Tim Walz speak so honestly and emotionally to the masses about IVF is the first time that I can recall a political figure doing so. I was recently reminded that in Michelle Obama’s memoir, “Becoming,” she reveals that she and Barack went through the desperate rollercoaster of IVF too. When the Obamas were campaigning, assisted reproductive technology wasn’t under attack the way it is now, and I can only imagine that they didn’t feel the need to share their private family planning journey with the world on the campaign trail. But just seven years later, the landscape in America is vastly different. We are now two years out from a post-Roe V. Wade world. With Alabama’s recent ruling that frozen embryos have the legal rights of children, reproductive healthcare is in jeopardy.
According to a Pew Research Center survey done in April, 7 in 10 adults believe that IVF access is “a good thing.” Polling continues to show that the majority of U.S. adults support protecting access to IVF. And although they publicly say they support it, Republicans, including JD Vance, voted against advancing a bill to establish a nationwide right to IVF and other fertility treatments. With fertility so fraught, reproductive rights are on the ballot once more and rightfully so. What feels different this election cycle is hearing these topics at the forefront of a male candidate’s stump speech.
We’ve always said that representation matters and representation means that we see people like us in aspirational roles. Historically, when we talk about infertility and IVF, these subjects are narrowly pegged as women’s issues. So it’s critical to hear Tim Walz’s plea for assisted fertility. Through him, we can see that access to reproductive rights should be gender-inclusive and bipartisan.
I felt tears well in my eyes as he told his story. I listened to his speech, looked at my own children, and felt a connection with a politician that I had heard little of just 24 hours before. I felt assurance that this issue means the world to him—and that means the world to me.
Watching Tim Walz talk about his journey gives me hope that all of us—no matter how we started our families and even for those who choose not to—feel less alone. When we see our elected officials fight for our rights, it hits differently to know how deeply meaningful a cause is to their own lives. For Tim Walz, the cause is personal. My hope is that Walz’s inclusion of IVF in his campaign will help normalize assisted reproductive technology for all of us and ensure that the much-needed procedure remains legal not only today but in the years to come. We all benefit from this conversation in the spotlight on the country’s biggest stage.
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