Walz also spoke about undergoing fertility treatment to conceive his daughter Hope through IVF (to be completely factual, in this interview, Walz’s wife Gwen said that she and her husband underwent Intrauterine Insemination or IUI).
“And if you've never experienced the hell that is infertility," Walz said. "I guarantee you, you know, somebody who has, and I can remember praying each night for a phone call, the pit in your stomach when the phone rang and the absolute agony when we heard the treatments hadn't worked, it took Gwen and me years, but we had access to facility treatments."
He continued with, "We also protected reproductive freedom, because in Minnesota, we respect our neighbors and the personal choices they make, and even if we wouldn’t make those same choices for ourselves, we’ve got a golden rule: mind your own damn business, and that includes IVF and fertility treatments.”
Walz's record
Ultimately, we might only ever be able to make informed decisions about politicians by what they have done in the past, surely not by campaign promises or rumors. In Walz’s case:
- When governor, he signed legislation solidifying the right to abortion and other reproductive health care into Minnesota statute. This measure made sure that the state’s existing reproductive rights protections remained in place.
- He and democrats in his state enacted new protections for the rights of LGBTQ+ persons so they could receive gender-affirming health care. This was especially aimed at families coming from outside the state seeking treatment for trans children. Minnesota also banned “conversion therapy.”
- As a high school teacher/football coach in rural Minnesota, Tim Walz helped his students create the school’s first Gay-Straight Alliance in the last year of the millennium.
