I've been waiting for this:
ZOMG! They are lying liars telling lies!
Oh ffs. Walz usually talks about the "fertility treatments" he and his wife got in order to have children, but occasionally refers to it by the common term IVF. In fact, as the New York Times reports, the Walzes actually used IUI, a different kind of treatment that's often casually referred to under the IVF umbrella but isn't technically IVF.
So now you know. This is a bit like saying you got pulled over by a police officer when it was really a sheriff's deputy. But of course the nitwits on the right have to insist that it's a big fat lie and Walz has been exposed as trying to fool everyone. Jesus.
More to the point, the anti-abortion zealots will be coming after IUI once they're done with IVF. When we did it, we were warned that multiple might result, requiring selective reduction. No way they'll ignore that aspect of it.
TIL - IUI is sometimes followed by selective reduction
"Oh ffs."
If you are going to write that every time National Review writes something idiotic, you will run out of f's in no time.
+1
It would be simpler for Kevin to just cancel his subscription to NR than to keep writing responses to it. But I guess that’s not an option for Kevin.
We paid him to do it so long he can't give it up.
The best stuff, as it is with so many NYT stories, is in the comments:
"In typical NYT fashion you are unerringly scrupulous when it comes to the facts concerning Gov Walz and his wife's struggles in conceiving a child as if this was the central debate concerning IVF in this election cycle. The truth is however Donald Trump and the Republican Party are willing to thwart the dreams of hundreds of thousands of families to have a child all in the service of cynical retrograde ideology."
Ross Douthat gets paid, and this guy doesn't?
"Haley Strack is a William F. Buckley Fellow in Political Journalism and a recent graduate of Hillsdale College."
Shocker.
I'm old enough to remember when most NR articles were rational and based in reality. Quite conservative, certainly, but they at least lived in the real world most of the time.
Yes, I'm old.
There are people who, needing to prove their intelligence and wit to themselves and others, will conflate the imprecise, colloquial language of the common man with the deliberate lies of a serial liar.
Just pat them on the back and ask them if they'd like a cookie or a gold star by their name, now that they've shown the world how smart they are.
Sucks for the Walzes, but honestly this is good for Democrats. Anything the GOP wants to do to (foolishly) raise the salience of reproductive healthcare as an issue is ok by me.
a desperately stupid attack that will at best accomplish nothing and more likely backfire.
Rick Scott (R-FL) has been running ads trumpeting that (unlike the pro-Life crazies in the GOP) he supports IVF firmly-- as his own daughter has used that means to conceive.
As with all things GOP, when someone supports a good policy even though that policy is opposed by the right, it is ALWAYS because it impacts them directly. They seem innately incapable of understanding anything unless it directly effects them
Yep just a minor technical difference.
Except that, you know, nobody actually objects to IUI.
Which makes Walz raising the issue about his personal life … completely irrelevant.
It doesn't seem, from several news sources I checked, that Tim Walz ever said that he and Gwen had IVF done to conceive their children. Rather, he has mentioned IVF and immediately followed that by saying that the Walzes had undergone years of fertility treatments. He ought to have been more careful. No one who's gone through fertility treatments thinks they've had IVF if they haven't. It's not used as an umbrella term. The umbrella term is ART, for "assisted reproductive technology," which encompasses IVF, IUI, and other fertility-enhancing methods.
So exactly how many angels do fit on the head of a pin?
Your guess is as good as mine on that one.
Luckily the guys on the other side are scrupulously honest.
In IUI, sperm are ejaculated or (uncommonly) surgically extracted, washed and then injected directly into the uterus via the cervix. This is done when, for some reason, natural fertilization isn't happening (which can be due to low sperm count, an allergy to semen, or any of dozens of other problems for either or both members of a couple).
In IVF, eggs are surgically extracted from a woman's ovaries, placed in a nutrient solution, and washed sperm are added to fertilize them. Zygotes resulting from this develop into embryos, some or all of which are injected into a uterus (which in surrogacy is someones aside from the woman from whom the ova were extracted). Any remaining embryos are frozen, donated to another family, used in fertility or genetic research (with the couple's permission) or discarded.
It's the disposition of embryos that the "pro-life" folks tend to focus on. Those don't exist as an issue in IUI, only IVF. Donation is not always possible nor desired by a couple, and most couples will discard or offer for research their frozen embryos when they no longer want to add more children to their family.
It is wrong to say that the anti-abortion folks do not object to IUI. In fact, many of them do because IUI often results in a large number of fertilized eggs and the doctors often recommend what is called "selective reduction", which is essentially an early abortion of a proportion of the fertilized eggs to increase the chance of survival of the remaining eggs and to reduce the strain on the woman of a large number of babies.
No, IUI alone doesn't result in a large number of fertilized eggs, since the ovary generally doesn't release more than one or two per natural cycle. (There are rare exceptions, but then the same thing can happen completely naturally. Some women are prone to develop multiple follicles.) However, IUI is sometimes combined with follicle stimulation via artificial hormones, and in that case multiples requiring reduction are fairly common. Someone who wants to avoid that can do IUI without medication.
It has a natural raised chance of multiples even without additional medication.
Twins and multiples don't only come from multiple eggs, dear.
IUI is generally used as a less expensive option before IVF is tried. It's great when it works for couples, but I think most couples go into it knowing that IVF will be the next step if IUI fails. I expect most couples going through infertility struggles know how important access to IVF is even if they are fortunate enough to not end up needing to use it.
Look, for the last two days they've exploded over Doritos. Can we just turn off the lights and pretend we're not home?
Forget it. National political reporting is hopelessly broken until something new grows back in the news space.
Josh Marshall made a good point recently - that most White House reporters no longer come from reporters working their way up from regional papers. So there's a perspective change, or loss, or however you want to see it. The ones we have now got started with ca. 2008 Politico as the cool kids. (Which, you have to admit, was quite a bit different. They're still catty and petty and playing their own game, but are much more professional about it now.)