Months before he was chosen as Vice President Kamala Harris’ running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz visited a Planned Parenthood clinic in his state alongside Harris — the first time a sitting president or vice president visited an abortion provider.
That visit in March put Minnesota’s efforts to safeguard reproductive rights in the spotlight.
Now, Harris and Walz represent a Democratic ticket that strongly supports access to abortion and fertility treatment, during an election in which these issues are expected to be important to voters and a focus of many Democratic campaigns.
Minnesota was the first state to pass a law protecting the right to abortion following the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision in 2022. wHI Walz signed in January 2023, stipulates that local governments — cities, counties, towns, etc. — cannot regulate a person’s choice to obtain an abortion or other reproductive services.
A few months later, Walz signed a second abortion rights law — this statute prohibits the arrest of abortion providers in Minnesota and protects people who travel there to avoid another state’s abortion ban. Under the law, Minnesota authorities do not have to turn over a patient’s health records in response to a subpoena or court order from another state.
The share of people who traveled to Minnesota from other states for abortions tripled between 2020 and 2023, according to data from the Guttmacher Institutea research organization that supports access to abortion.
Abortion rights advocates pointed to these actions when expressing support for Walz on Tuesday.
“By choosing Governor Walz as his running mate, Vice President Harris has presented the most pro-reproductive ticket in history,” said Alexis McGill Johnson, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Action Fund, in a statement. “Gov. Walz is a longtime advocate for sexual and reproductive health care and has been a fierce supporter of abortion rights as governor.”
Minnesota, which traditionally votes for Democratic presidential candidates, has some of the most progressive abortion policies in the country. Abortion has been legal there since the Roe decision in 1974. In 1995, the Minnesota Supreme Court ruled that the right to abortion was protected by the state constitution.
Since Roe was overturned, the state has taken additional steps to make abortions easier to obtain. In July 2022, a district judge struck down several requirements that hampered access, including a rule that only doctors could perform abortions and a mandatory 24-hour waiting period. Abortions are also covered by state Medicaid funds.
As governor, Walz also cut funding for a Minnesota Department of Health grant program that supported so-called crisis pregnancy centers, which offer counseling and supplies to pregnant women while often trying to convince them not to do so. abortions. It is known that some of these centers provide inaccurate or misleading information.
National Right to Life, the nation’s largest anti-abortion organization, said Tuesday that Walz’s decision to defund crisis pregnancy centers in her state was a “huge blow” to families.
“If elected, a Harris-Walz administration would push for the most extreme abortion policies of any administration,” Carol Tobias, president of National Right to Life, said in a statement.
In addition to his support for access to abortion, Walz has advocated for in vitro fertilization. Many abortion rights advocates fear that access to fertility treatment will be threatened after Dobbs, since in vitro fertilization often involves discarding embryos due to genetic abnormalities or because they are no longer needed. Some who believe in the notion of fetal personhood have opposed this practice. The National Right to Life, for example, says that frozen embryos should be donated to other couples instead of destroyed.
Walz said the Minneapolis Star Tribune in March that his two children were born with the help of fertility treatments, which his wife had been receiving for seven years before becoming pregnant with their daughter.
In February, Walz criticized an Alabama Supreme Court ruling that said embryos created through in vitro fertilization were considered children, meaning people could theoretically be sued for destroying them. The decision led several IVF providers in Alabama to discontinue their services; they resumed once the state passed legal protections for doctors and fertility clinics.
“This issue is deeply personal for our family and so many others,” Walz wrote on Facebook at the time. “Don’t let these guys get away with saying they support IVF when their handpicked judges oppose it. Actions speak louder than words and your actions are clear.”
Walz too expressed support one account introduced last year in the Minnesota House of Representatives that would require Minnesota health plans that offer maternity coverage to also cover fertility treatment. He also called for language to be added to Minnesota’s abortion rights law, signed in January 2023, that would further guarantee access to IVF and other fertility treatments.
Walz’s office did not respond to a request for comment. A Harris campaign official said restoring the protections offered by Roe “is the ticket’s position.”
This story originally appeared on NBCNews.com read the full story
