Michigan GOP House nominee Tom Barrett has spent years working to ban abortion
The former state senator is running against Democratic former state Sen. Curtis Hertel for the open 7th Congressional District seat.
Former Michigan state Sen. Tom Barrett, the Republican nominee in one of the nation’s most competitive House races, has long sought to ban abortion with almost no exceptions and to grant full legal protections to embryos and fetuses.
During his unsuccessful 2022 campaign for Michigan’s 7th Congressional District seat, Barrett emphasized his opposition to reproductive rights; he lost to Democratic incumbent Rep. Elissa Slotkin 52%-46%. Now, as he faces a different candidate for the same seat, Barrett appears to be playing down his anti-abortion record.
With Slotkin running for Michigan’s open U.S. Senate seat in November, Barrett is facing former Democratic state Sen. Curtis Hertel for the open House seat. A supporter of abortion rights and women’s health care, Hertel has been endorsed by both the Planned Parenthood Action Fund and Reproductive Freedom for All.
Barrett’s 2024 campaign website makes no mention of abortion. In February, he told the Washington Examiner that he did not think the subject would be as big a concern for voters as it had been two years earlier and suggested that Hertel’s gender would eliminate any advantage the Democratic candidate might have had on the abortion issue: “My opponent is not a woman. He does not have the depth of resources that Slotkin had. The top of the ticket should be far more competitive. The abortion proposal, which dominated the race and every race in America seemingly two years ago, is not on the ballot in Michigan this year.”
Asked about abortion in a July 2 television interview, Barrett falsely claimed that the federal government doesn’t have the power to enact abortion bans; House Republicans have in fact long tried to pass legislation that would ban the procedure nationwide. “A member of Congress is not going to be overturning the state constitutional law that is now codified in our state constitution,” Barrett said. “That would be up to the people of Michigan to decide, if they choose to do that. What I’m looking to do, as I said, is make sure that we protect against taxpayer-funded abortions, protect the rights of conscience of those that are in the medical community and … really looking at how we can encourage life-affirming options, like adoption.”
Barrett’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment for this story. During his time in the Michigan Legislature and as a 2022 candidate, Barrett repeatedly acted to limit reproductive rights.
“Protecting individual rights includes protecting the unborn. Ashley and I have been involved in the pro-life movement our entire lives and as an elected leader, I will always work to protect life from conception,” Barrett said on his 2022 campaign site.
Barrett told the anti-abortion group Michigan Family Forum in March 2018 that he backed full legal protections for embryos and fetuses and supported a proposal to allow pregnant women to count them as dependent children for tax purposes: “I think any way in which we can acknowledge the fact that a pregnancy and an unborn child is a human being and is a child that’s fully participating and fully protected by our laws is something that I would encourage and support. I’m very pro-life. It’s something that is deeply fundamental to my belief system, and a major reason why I’m involved in public policy is because I believe that we need to do a better job of protecting human life at all vulnerable stages, in particular the life of the unborn.”
In 2019, Barrett introduced a bill that would have banned abortion in Michigan after 12 weeks’ gestation except when medically necessary to save the life of the pregnant person, making the procedure a felony punishable by two-year prison term for medical providers. He told the Lansing news outlet MIRS that year that he also backed a six-week abortion ban, based on the scientifically dismissed claim that fetuses have heartbeats at that stage.
In a September 2022 MIRS interview, Barrett was asked if he was pro-life without exceptions. “I’m pro-life, including the life of the mother, so I am consistently pro-life. That is a scientific position that, you know, we have overwhelming scientific consensus that life begins in the womb, and that is something that I hold as a sincere and principled position,” he answered, before repeating the lie that Slotkin and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi backed “a no-holds-barred abortion up to the moment of birth, for purposes of birth control, taxpayer-funded for that, to take our tax money and put it toward public funding of abortions, to disregard parental consent.”
Abortion is not a form of birth control. However, opponents of reproductive rights often conflate the two as they work to ban both of them.
A month after that MIRS interview, Barrett told Fox News that, unlike Slotkin, he strongly opposed Michigan’s 2022 ballot measure to enshrine reproductive rights in the state constitution: “I can’t be more clear about it. I’m opposed to Proposal 3. That’s what my opponent supports. I frankly don’t.” The amendment passed 57%-43% statewide.
