Kamala Harris chose a running mate who is as extreme on children’s health care as she is.
Democrat vice presidential candidate and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz describes his state of Minnesota as a sanctuary. But a sanctuary for whom, exactly? Not for the children deceived into permanently mutilating their bodies. Not for the parents stripped of custody of their children. And not for the babies born alive after abortion.
Minnesota is not a sanctuary — it’s a health risk to children and a graveyard for parental rights.
Governor Tim Walz was one of 14 governors who signed legislation to make their states “sanctuary states” for children who believe they are transgender. Walz joined states like California, Washington, and New York, drafting an executive order and signing a successive state law encouraging these children to travel to his state for experimental treatments or surgeries.
Walz rewrote child custody laws that endanger a parent’s custody if the child claims to need “gender affirming care.” If the child has fled from another state, Walz supersedes other state laws that might have more appropriate jurisdiction for custody decisions, granting jurisdiction to Minnesota courts simply because the child is in the state for “gender affirming care.” If a parent with custody is in another state and wants to bring his or her child home, Walz prohibits state officials from complying with child removal requests if the child is in the state for “gender affirming care.”
But this wasn’t enough for Walz. He added restrictions on subpoenas, arrests, or extraditions to other states, and he requires all state-regulated health insurance plans to include coverage of expensive transgender treatments for children and adults as part of any insurance plan. This means that all Minnesotans on a state-regulated health plan will pay for the hundreds of thousands of dollars in experimental surgeries that are now considered “medically necessary” under Walz’s new requirements.
Yet other countries have found these types of treatments lack the clinical evidence to back up the claims of being “medically necessary.” The United Kingdom issued an emergency ban on the prescription of puberty blockers to children and adolescents with gender dysphoria, and four other European nations restricted access to hormone treatments.
It is no surprise that Vice President Kamala Harris chose Walz. The Biden-Harris administration recently finalized nondiscrimination rules that mimic what Walz did in Minnesota. They require health plans to cover transgender surgeries for children and adults and mandate that all providers provide related treatments, or be subject to a civil rights violation, even if their state bans the practice. Indeed, there should be no doubt that a Harris-Walz administration would also try to finalize rules mimicking Minnesota’s extreme child custody laws that violate parental rights and erode the sacred obligation of parents to protect their children.
Harris also chose a candidate as radical on abortion as she is. For 25 years, Minnesota’s health agency was required to publish an abortion statistics report each year; when reports from 2019 and 2021 revealed some doctors were not providing life-saving care to babies born alive, Walz quickly tried to cover it up.
In 2019, the Induced Abortions in Minnesota Report revealed that three infants who survived abortions were not given the life-saving care required by Minnesota law. They died under Waltz’s watch during his first year as governor. Two years later, five more babies died similarly.
Walz’s response? Cover-up. He signed SF 2995, an omnibus bill that eliminates the reporting requirements that revealed those deaths. Today, we don’t know how many more babies are born alive during failed abortions in Minnesota and then left to die.
This bill could have been called the Abortion Omnibus bill — it increases abortion provider pay, requires Minnesota health plans to pay for abortion, allows taxpayer dollars to fund abortions, allows more facilities to provide abortions, strikes virtually all reporting on abortion, and even renames a pregnant woman who is seeking an abortion “an individual with the intention of terminating … a pregnancy.” The bill also strikes prohibitions on abortion and family planning services in elementary schools, removes conscience protections for providers, and removes penalties for entities coercing mothers into abortions.
It’s all a far cry from what Americans support. Two in three Americans favor requiring parental notification before a teenager has an abortion. Nine in 10 Americans support requiring abortion mills to meet health and medical standards applied to other health care facilities — which would include a zero-tolerance policy for coercion in any type of medical procedure. Four in five Americans support conscience protections for health care professionals, protecting them from performing procedures against their moral beliefs.
Harris and Walz are willing to endanger women, children, and parents to advance their radical policies.
Bobby Jindal was the governor of Louisiana from 2008-2016. Heidi Overton, M.D., Ph.D., serves as chief policy officer and vice chair of the Center for a Healthy America at the America First Policy Institute. She previously served as a White House Fellow from 2019-2020 and is board-certified in preventive medicine and general public health.
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