On Tuesday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “Andrea Mitchell Reports,” host and NBC News Chief Washington Correspondent and Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent Andrea Mitchell said that there’s “a pettiness” to 2024 Republican vice presidential candidate Sen. JD Vance (R-OH) pointing out that his Democratic counterpart, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D), falsely claimed his wife used IVF treatments to conceive — a claim that Walz used as a basis to attack Vance and that Walz’s wife admits wasn’t accurate — and argued that “when people are talking about fertility, they’re just talking about fertility.”
Mitchell said, “[T]here is a pettiness, let me just say, in some of the attacks. I’m just saying that. JD Vance went after the Walzs, who have been very open about their fertility problems, Gwen Walz wrote a piece in Glamour, to be public about that is not easy for anyone, especially someone on this stage. And he went after them, saying that they exaggerated, because it was a different type of fertility, not in vitro — it was intrauterine. And to — when people are talking about fertility, they’re just talking about fertility. They’re trying to have children. And to say that he’s exaggerating about their types of fertility treatments just strikes me as, what is going on with this campaign?”
Washington Post Senior National Political Correspondent and MSNBC Political Analyst Ashley Parker responded that dealing with fertility problems is “devastating and it is heartbreaking and it is stressful and it is sometimes joyful, but it is not something that any American wants to be made into a political attack.”
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