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.
