SAUNDERS: Here’s how far Harris-Walz and the media will go to smear JD Vance

WASHINGTON — In vitro fertilization has become a big issue in the 2024 presidential campaign.

The Kamala Harris camp argues that Donald Trump is a “threat to reproductive freedom, including IVF.” It’s an odd stipulation given that Trump basically has committed to free IVF, where an egg is surgically removed from an ovary and fertilized in a lab.

“We are going to be, under the Trump administration, we are going to be paying for that treatment,” Trump told NBC News on Aug. 29. “We’re going to be mandating that the insurance company pay.”

Harris’ running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, made IVF an issue in August when, according to The Associated Press, he said of Trump’s running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance: “If it was up to him, I wouldn’t have a family because of IVF.”

Walz later had to admit that his beautiful children, Hope and Gus, were conceived by a different procedure, intrauterine insemination. Details.

Oh, and it turns out Vance is in favor of IVF.

“Tim Walz is knowingly lying about JD’s position on IVF for political gain, just like he lied about going to war for political gain,” Vance spokesman Luke Schroeder told the Review-Journal.

On Tuesday, The New York Times released a story about Vance under the headline, “Vance Championed 2017 Report on Families from Architects of Project 2025,” a conservative wish list meant to guide Trump if he wins in November.

The story notes that Vance supports IVF, but leads with the fact that Vance “endorsed a little-noticed 2017 report by the Heritage Foundation that proposed a sweeping conservative agenda to restrict sexual and reproductive freedoms and remake American families.”

It was guilt-by-association mudslinging that linked Vance’s introduction to Heritage’s 2017 Index of Culture and Opportunity with 29 essays that were part of the package, including an essay written by Jennifer Lahl, founder of the Center for Bioethics and Culture Network.

“I love the IVF babies, too,” Lahl told me over the phone, but she is concerned about the high cost of IVF, its low success rate and risks to women’s health.

Lahl said she is sympathetic toward those who “can’t have children and want children,” but she is wary of an industry that can “lure people into thinking that we can defer motherhood to fit our own timeline.”

The weak story, however, provided another opportunity to re-report the all-important revelation that in 2021 Vance called big-name Democrats (including Harris) “childless cat ladies.”

I’ll give you more of the quote Vance said to then-Fox News host Tucker Carlson: “It’s just a basic fact — you look at Kamala Harris, (Transportation Secretary) Pete Buttigieg, (Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) AOC — the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children. And how does it make any sense that we’ve turned our country over to people who don’t really have a direct stake in it?”

Confession time: I am a childless cat lady — who moved on to dogs — but I take no offense.

I think Vance had a point when he argued that people who don’t have children don’t have a direct stake in policy disputes “via their own offspring.”

I’m not arguing that those of us who are not parents don’t have a stake in policy. We do.

But I don’t know a single parent who doesn’t consider the experience of having children as transformative. So leave me out of the pile-on.

It must drive the left nuts that Vance is the author of “Hillbilly Elegy,” a wrenching memoir about his challenging childhood in an Ohio, where jobs were disappearing and substance abuse was rampant. But really, what can you say about a kid who enlisted in the Marines, graduated from Yale Law and thrived in circles he grew up thinking were closed to him?

So the left ignores his amazing personal story and grabs any quote available to make him look bad.

Contact Review-Journal Washington columnist Debra J. Saunders at dsaunders@reviewjournal.com. Follow @debrajsaunders on X.