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Minnesota First Lady Gwen Walz detailed experience going through fertility treatments to a crowd in North Carolina on Monday. The wife of Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, Vice President Kamala Harris’s running mate, traveled to Raleigh, North Carolina with Harris’s husband, Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff, as part of their campaign jaunt through the south.
Ms Walz said she was moved to speak about her and the governor’s experiences with fertility treatment after Alabama’s Supreme Court legally classified frozen embryos as children. That move put the future of IVF in jeopardy in the state.
The Alabama court’s decision “just brought us right back to that moment where Tim and I were having to make some of those decisions ourselves, but they were our decisions to make,” Walz told the crowd. “It brought back a crush of emotions that we hadn’t felt in many, many years.”
Democrats have attacked Republicans for putting IVF in jeopardy after the chief justice in the Alabama case cited the Dobbs v Jackson decision from 2022 that overturned Roe v Wade. In response, Senate Democrats forced a vote to protect IVF — which Republicans blocked. Vance of Ohio — now Trump’s running mate — joined all but two Republicans in opposing the legislation.
Ms Walz said that she and Mr Walz did not share their difficulty in conceiving with many people.
“It was almost too much to bear to even tell our friends and family, because then the disappointment felt exponential,” she said. They finally told their neighbor Mary because she was a nurse and Ms Walz needed injections as part of her fertility treatment, which she couldn’t administer herself.
“Some of you who've been through this process know that injection, and it happens back behind and so I couldn't do that myself,” she said.
“And now, I know you all are learning how great Tim is, but let’s just say it’s a good thing he didn’t become a nurse or doctor,” she added, to laughter in the room. “No matter how much he tried or practiced, he couldn’t quite do it.”
Ms Walz said that the process they went through lasted for years.
“That journey was hard, but we kept going, and it was worth it. Eventually, we had our daughter, and it's no accident after that that we named her Hope,” she said. The Walz family would welcome their son Gus, who went viral for cheering his father during the Democratic National Convention last month, six years later.
“He is the one who took down Roe and unleashed all of this chaos and all of this cruelty,” Walz said of Trump, before moving onto Vance.
“Who asked him to tell us how to build our families?” she said. “Nobody asked him and nobody’s going to ask him. JD, we’re not asking.”
Ms Walz then reprised a routine she began recently where she put on a pair of glasses that she used to wear during her years working as a schoolteacher.
“School has started,” she said. “Mr Trump and Mr Vance, please mind your own business.”
In recent weeks, Trump has tried to pivot on reproductive rights. He most recently announced that IVF would be fully covered under his administration — a move which left many conservatives reeling.
