Tim Walz’s misleading IVF story could prove fatal

For years, Tim Walz has claimed that he and his wife Gwen used in-vitro fertilization to conceive their two children Hope, twenty-three, and Gus, seventeen. The Minnesota governor has weaponized his emotional journey to attack Republicans opposed to the procedure and used it to lockdown the VP slot on Kamala Harris’s protection of reproduction rights ticket.  

But the New York Times reports — giving Walz the softest of soft landings — that in fact his wife had intrauterine insemination, or IUI, to conceive, not in vitro fertilization, or IVF. 

There is a huge difference between the two procedures, as Walz knows. Principally that there are no moves by Republicans to use the overturning of Roe v. Wade to ban IUI.

With IUI, sperm is directly injected into the uterus; with IVF, eggs are fertilized in a laboratory. Republicans with strong religious beliefs oppose IVF because it leads to the destruction of surplus embryos, which they regard as human life.

When Alabama briefly suspended IVF services earlier this year, Walz saw his opportunity. He called it “a direct attack on my children” and sent out a fundraising letter enclosed in an envelope that read, “My wife and I used IVF to start a family.”

Kamala Harris noticed. She wanted to harness the power of Walz’s personal story — that IVF is not about politics, it’s about his family — to ram home her key election policy. It gave him an edge over Josh Shapiro and the deal to be her running mate was done.

In Walz’s first appearance alongside Harris at a rally in Philadelphia two weeks ago, he spoke once again about the journey he and his wife Gwen went through to conceive their children.

“Mind your own damn business,” Walz told the crowd as he took aim at Republicans. “Look, that includes IVF. And this is where it gets personal for me and my family.”

While Walz did not say explicitly at the rally that his wife had IVF, he very much implied it — and certainly didn’t correct the record when major publishers reported that she had. Among others that stated as fact the Walzes had used IVF was TIME, which headlined its story “For Tim Walz, the IVF Political Battles Are Personal,” and the Atlantic, which went with “More People Should Be Talking About IVF the Way Tim Walz Is,” and Politico, which stated How Walz’s IVF story could be a problem for the GOP. 

Before the rally, their use of IVF was already being stated as fact by the New York Times, the Associated Press and the Minnesota Star Tribune. 

The American public would be forgiven for thinking Walz has lied to them; so too journalists, and so too his new boss, who will be furious.

Harris needs Walz for one thing only: to win the debate against J.D. Vance on October 1. But his grand deception over IVF now makes that victory much less likely. It was to be his key attack line, to point out that if Vance got his way, people like Walz would not be able to have children. He was supposed to haul Vance over the coals for voting against a Democrat bill to establish a nationwide right to IVF. Instead, he has handed Vance a cudgel to beat him with on live TV: how will Walz explain away his weasel words and political sleight of hand to the nation? 

Harris will now expect the media to fall in line and protect her fledgling campaign as the New York Times did by downplaying the story, the tone of which was of a small clarification that quoted only people who weren’t bothered by Walz’s deception. Supposedly objective journalists in major newsrooms across America will share Harris’s terror that negative headlines during her coronation at the Democratic National Conference may hurt her slender polling against Donald Trump. They remember Hillary’s emails and Hunter’s laptop.  

But would they apply the same standard if they discovered that Vance had been lying about a formative element of his character, such as being from hillbilly stock? Of course not. 

Unlike Walz’s other tall tales, this is a deception that has unraveled in real time. Many Americans are aware that Harris picked him because his IVF struggle illuminated an electoral weakness within the Republican Party. It also resonated on an emotional level. They will feel personally misled and unlikely to be as forgiving as they have been towards his other deceits, which now come back into sharp focus.

Take his service in the Army National Guard, for example. He claimed he carried weapons in war despite never seeing combat. Vance has repeatedly accused him of “stolen valor.” Former servicemen have accused him of lying about his rank: when he left the military in 2005 it was as a master sergeant, yet he told the press he was a command sergeant major. 

When the press dug up an old DUI he got as a thirty-one-year-old teacher, his campaign manager claimed that he wasn’t drunk and that he couldn’t hear the arresting cop due to partial deafness caused by his military service. The police officer who arrested him came forward last week to call him a liar saying, “Saw drunk, arrested same.”

And he has even apparently lied about tacos. When he told Harris in a YouTube discussion last week that he ate “white-guy tacos” that consist of “ground beef and cheese,” social media users quickly dug up a recipe he said he loved in 2022 showing diced green chilis and a bottle of taco sauce on the ingredients list.

Harris will be reeling and wondering with genuine fear what other fibs he has told. This could this even be Walz’s own Joe Biden moment: not 2024 Joe, but 1987 Joe. Then Biden, a senator running for the Democratic nominee for president, plagiarized a speech made by Neil Kinnock, the leader of Britain’s Labour Party. Allegations soon followed of plagiarism in law school and of exaggerating his academic record. Biden dropped out of the race saying he had been overrun by “the exaggerated shadow” of his past mistakes. Will the growing and genuine shadow cast by Walz’s past falsehoods force him to follow suit?

Unlike Walz’s claim that Vance and Trump are “creepy” and “weird,” which gained traction largely on social media, his IVF deception cuts through to the real world. Real voters recognize a liar when they see one. The cynical manipulation of his and his wife’s struggle to conceive for his own political gain will disgust them. As his “Midwestern nice” mask slips, his value to Harris is heads towards net loss territory.

For the Democratic Party that luxuriates in pointing out Trump’s lies, it’s not a headache it’s a migraine. If Walz gets a pass, voters won’t see why Trump shouldn’t get one too. Nor will Trump. When Harris accuses Trump of lying in her debate with him on September 10, he can just deflect with Walz’s own misrepresentations.

Worst of all for Harris, it reflects terribly on her already questionable judgment. How can she be trusted to run a country when she hires a deputy who’s a borderline fantasist? Lyin’ Tim is a symptom as well as a symbol of her own incompetence.