Tim Walz Has Said His Family Struggled To Have Children

After the Alabama Supreme Court declared that embryos are people in a controversial ruling earlier this year, briefly jeopardizing access to the fertility treatment known as in vitro fertilization, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) started talking about his own family’s fertility struggle.

Days after the court’s decision, Walz, a father of two, said he knew IVF would become a “foundational” campaign issue this November because he and his wife, Gwen Walz, had trouble having children.

“I got a very narrow skillset, but having the zeitgeist through these things, I’m telling you, it’s a big thing,” Walz, the chairman of the Democratic Governors Association, said in a roundtable interview with reporters in Washington, D.C., in February.

“In full disclosure, my wife and I used Mayo Clinic reproductive services, and my daughter Hope was named Hope for a reason,” he continued. “Because married for eight years, no children, wanting children. We got Hope because of this type of stuff. I can’t be the only one that’s there.”

Without going into any detail about the treatments, Walz shared more in an interview with the Minnesota Star Tribune the following month, when he recounted his wife calling him crying after they’d spent years undergoing treatments at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.

“I said, ‘Not again,’” Walz told the paper. “She said, ‘No, I’m pregnant.’ It’s not by chance that we named our daughter Hope.”

Hope Walz is now 23 and her brother, Gus Walz, is 17. (Tim Walz has not shared the specific treatment he and his wife received.)

At the time of the interviews, Walz was pushing the Minnesota legislature to enact extra protections for IVF in the state, which is the same thing the Alabama legislature wound up doing as