Since Tim Walz was nominated as Kamala Harris’ running mate for the Democrat ticket, one of the hot-button topics it was assumed he would clash with the Republican’s JD Vance on was fertility treatment and in vitro fertilisation (IVF).

JD Vance, a Catholic convert and former President Donald Trump’s running mate and vice-presidential nomination, does not support IVF. While Walz has very publicly discussed him and his wife struggling to conceive children and having to resort to IVF fertility treatment, which has been reported on by various media and thereby informing the accompanying public discourse.

But after the New York Times recently reached out to the Harris-Walz campaign on the topic, it was clarified that the couple did not rely on IVF but on another common fertility procedure called intrauterine insemination, or IUI.

IUI does not involve creating or discarding embryos, which is one of the main reasons the Catholic Church opposes IVF as, akin to abortion, it involves the destruction of human life at its earliest and most vulnerable stage.

IUI works by taking a sample of highly concentrated sperm and, in an attempt to mimic natural conception, inserting it into a woman’s uterus with a catheter.

The New York Times notes that Walz has typically referred to his family as having undergone “treatments like” IVF, and reports that Mia Ehrenberg, a campaign spokeswoman, has said that “Governor Walz talks how normal people talk” and “he was using commonly understood shorthand for fertility treatments”.

The issue of protecting IVF and fertility treatments, as with access to abortion, has become a focal point that the Democratic Party is using in its election campaign against the Republican Party, which is presented as wanting to unfairly stop or restrict access for people.

In his State of the State address this year as Governor of Minnesota, Walz attacked the recent Alabama Supreme Court ruling that frozen embryos in test tubes should be considered as equal to unborn children, and which led to a pause in IVF treatments there, characterising the court’s decision as a “direct attack on my children”.

Given that the IUI fertility treatment Walz and his wife used does not, as with IVF treatment, involve any use of embryos, his claim appears somewhat muddled at best.

Then on 25 July, the New York Times notes that, with Kamala Harris having suddenly replaced Joe Biden as the Democrat’s presidential contender for November and looking for a running mate, Walz came out and criticised JD Vance for “opposing the miracle of IVF’’ through his voting against legislation that would have protected access to the procedure.

Even though Walz and his wife did not use IVF, it is unlikely to change the current tensions around fertility treatment, both on the campaign trail and among wider US society.

IUI, like IVF, is an artificial reproduction technology that, in the eyes of the Catholic Church, bypasses the natural act of intercourse in order to create life and is therefore not considered acceptable by the Church.

As stated by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB): “If the intervention replaces the marriage act in order to engender life, it is not moral.”

The bishops set out the overall problem and context: “Infertility is a growing problem in the United States. And in true American fashion, there has been a corresponding growth in a ‘reproductive technologies industry’ to provide a solution.

“It is quite legitimate, indeed praiseworthy, to try to find ways to overcome infertility,” though the bishops go on to say:

“The many techniques now used to overcome infertility also have profound moral implications, and couples should be aware of these before making decisions about their use. Each technique should be assessed to see if it is truly moral, that is, whether or not it promotes human good and human flourishing. All these technologies touch in some way on innocent human life.”

Especially given the current fractious political climate, it is a difficult area both for the Church and for politicians like JD Vance to negotiate.

As Pia Matthews discusses in her Catholic Herald article about fertility treatment: “Infertility is a tragedy for women and for men who want to become mothers and fathers and grandparents” and “there was a time when couples lived with this tragedy and accepted that having their own child was not meant to be.”

But then “the development of IVF technology in the 1970s opened up the possibility of bypassing the causes of infertility” and seemingly offered a solution “going straight to pregnancy”.

While she notes that the reality is far less straightforward than “going straight to pregnancy”, with IVF remaining a very difficult, emotionally fraught and expensive option, many people bristle, not surprisingly, that such a remedy giving people the chance to have and love children should be frowned upon or criticised – especially by an institution such as the Catholic Church.

The issue of parenthood and children has also emerged as a contentious issue on the campaign trail in relation to Kamala Harris, with JD Vance being taken to task for previous comments made in 2021 when he raised the point that the country was being led by various Democrats who do not have their own children; Harris has two step children through the previous marriage of her husband Doug Emhoff.

In the 2021 interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, Vance says that the US is, in effect, run by “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too”.

He goes on to say, after mentioning Harris and a number of other prominent Democratic politicians who don’t have children, that “the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children. And how does it make any sense that we have turned our country over to people who don’t really have a direct stake in it.”

Walz has said that he and his wife spent seven years trying to have children, while his wife has described “the journey that is infertility” as a “desperation that can eat away at your soul”.

Her pained point highlights how, despite all the rancour and vitriol that increasingly attends US politics, as the country heads to polls this November it is at least engaging with and arguing about issues – unlike the UK general election where such sensitive topics barely got a look in – that, even if the nuance is not often forthcoming in debates, are fundamentally linked to the human condition and to vital questions around human flourishing.