JD Vance accuses Tim Walz of lying about his IVF experience

After speaking about his family's fertility problems during the campaign, Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz is being criticized by his opponent for not accurately describing the treatment of his wife Gwen.

Republican vice presidential candidate Sen. JD Vance of Ohio on Tuesday accused Walz of lying when she claimed his children were conceived through artificial insemination. Vance was apparently responding to an article in Glamour magazine in which Gwen Walz said she had undergone a fertility treatment called intrauterine insemination.

“It's just so bizarre to lie about it, isn't it? There's nothing wrong with having a child through IVF or not, so why lie about it? I just don't understand it,” Vance told reporters in Milwaukee.

“Anyone who has undergone fertility treatment themselves or a friend knows the difference,” he added.

Both IVF and IUI are forms of assisted reproductive technology. In IVF, eggs are removed from the ovaries and fertilized with sperm in the laboratory. Then one or more embryos are transferred to the uterus. In IUI, sperm is placed directly into the uterus. In both cases, a doctor inserts a small, flexible tube into the vagina to transfer the sperm or an embryo to the uterus.

Some staunch anti-abortion activists oppose the practice of discarding embryos, a common part of the IVF process. Like most Republicans, Vance voted against Democratic legislation protecting IVF.

Tim Walz has never directly said that he and his wife had their children through artificial insemination, but some of his previous statements suggest that this was the case.

In February, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that embryos created through IVF are considered children (meaning people could theoretically be sued for destroying them), and Walz wrote on Facebook that he and his wife “have two beautiful children thanks to reproductive health care like IVF.”

And last month, he said on the podcast “Pod Save America” ​​that if it were up to Vance, “I wouldn't have a family because of IVF and the things that we need to reproduce. My children were born in that direct way – you know, that way.”

Mia Ehrenberg, a spokeswoman for the Harris-Walz campaign, said in a statement Tuesday that Walz had “used common-sense acronyms for fertility treatments” in his previous comments.

“The Trump campaign's attacks on Ms. Walz are just another example of how cruel and out of touch with reality Donald Trump and JD Vance are when it comes to women's health care,” Ehrenberg said.

Several fertility doctors said that IUI and IVF are often confused.

“When someone thinks they are doing fertility treatment, they automatically think they are doing IVF,” says Dr. Brian Levine, founding partner of CCRM Fertility New York.

In reality, he added, “there are different treatment options, and IUI is one of the tools in my toolbox.”

Dr. Eli Reshef, an infertility specialist at Advanced Fertility Center of Chicago and a member of WINFertility's advisory board, said “the majority of my patients, but not all, know the difference” between IUI and IVF.

There can be some overlap between the two processes. For example, Gwen Waltz said in a statement Tuesday that her treatment involved injections typically used in IVF patients.

“The only person who knew in detail what we were going through was our neighbor. She was a nurse and helped me with the shots I needed as part of the IUI process,” she said. “I rushed home from school and she gave me the shots to make sure we stayed on track.”

In most cases, patients undergoing IUI take pills to stimulate egg production, but a minority use injectable hormones. In this sense, medications most commonly associated with IVF have contributed to the success of IUI in some couples.

Injections can be used in the IUI process for several reasons, said Dr. Shaun Williams, partner in reproductive endocrinology at Illume Fertility in Connecticut.

“If we have not been successful in getting two or three eggs each month, we sometimes switch to stronger medications to increase the chances of success,” Williams said.

He added that some people also choose injections because they are “limited in the number of attempts they can make due to limited insurance coverage or cost.”

IUI has a lower success rate per cycle than IVF, but is less expensive and invasive. Women undergoing IVF must give themselves daily injections for one to two weeks and undergo regular ultrasounds and blood draws. Egg retrieval requires anesthesia and involves inserting a needle into the ovaries to retrieve the eggs.

Many fertility specialists recommend trying IUI first. Some patients are also not candidates for IVF.

“I tell my patients, 'Let's do three IUIs. If that is not successful, we will talk about the more complex and expensive option: in vitro,'” Reshef said.

Both IVF and IUI are often associated with great stress and emotional strain for couples wishing to have children.

“When my wife and I decided to have children, we had been through years of infertility treatments,” Walz said at a rally in Philadelphia this month. “And I remember praying every night for a phone call with good news, the sinking feeling in my stomach when the phone rang, and the pain I felt when we heard the treatments hadn't worked. So it was no accident that we named our daughter Hope when we brought her into the world.”