Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) on Sunday laid out his defense for prior misstatements on the campaign trail, chalking up some of his inaccurate rhetoric to the passion that he has for hot-button policy issues.
The interview with Fox News Sunday was the vice presidential nominee’s first Sunday show appearance after largely dodging national media since being tapped by Vice President Kamala Harris to be her running mate.
“Look, I speak passionately. I had an entire career decades before I was in public office,” Walz said. “I’m very proud of my 24 years in service and my record. I have never disparaged someone else in this, but I know that’s not what Donald Trump does.”
Walz was pressed on inaccuracies about his personal experience using intrauterine insemination rather than in vitro fertilization, a 1995 DUI arrest, his military record, and falsely claiming he was at the pro-democracy Tiananmen Square protests in China in the late 1980s.
As governor, he signed into law a bill that goes beyond Roe v. Wade by lacking restrictions on abortion throughout the nine-month pregnancy. Language was also taken out of Minnesota law regarding the need to “preserve the life and health of the born alive infant,” what treatment they receive, and whether they live or die. The revision Walz approved instead required that a doctor “care for the infant who is born alive.”
The change caused anti-abortion access advocates to argue that doctors are no longer legally required to save the life of a baby that survives an abortion in Minnesota. Abortion access advocates point to the federal ban on partial-birth abortions to argue that the practice of killing babies delivered alive is already illegal.
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Walz said his state’s laws are no different than other abortion protections across the country.
“Minnesota law aligns with every other case of what physicians are required by their ethical responsibilities,” he said. “It changed nothing other than aligning with all care that physicians provide in any circumstance for any medical case. So it’s alignment as it’s always been. It’s the cases we’ve seen in Minnesota. The outcomes we get in our healthcare results are the best in the nation. And all it did was align with existing law.”