Michigan Republican in Tight Senate Race Says He'd Respect Abortion Rights. His Record Suggests Otherwise.

Up and down the ballot, GOP candidates are posturing as moderates on abortion and attempting to distance themselves from their party’s overarching goal to ban it for as many people as possible. One such candidate is Mike Rogers in Michigan, a former Congressman running in a tight race for control of the U.S. Senate. In June, Rogers, who’s up against pro-abortion rights Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D), said on a local radio station that abortion is a “settled matter” in Michigan, which voted to codify a right to abortion in the state Constitution in 2022. Before that, in May, Rogers said he was “not going back to Washington, D.C. to undo what the people of Michigan decided to do.” 

But, a review of Rogers' Congressional record—archived by Oakland University in Michigan—reveals Rogers didn't always feel this way.

During his tenure in Congress from 2001 to 2015 (which is when he retired and moved to Florida, only returning to Michigan to run for Senate in 2023), Rogers sent numerous letters to constituents pledging to ban abortion and to “protect the lives of the unborn,” including a resounding letter of support to people traveling to Washington D.C. for the anti-abortion March for Life in 2000.

“As you join with tens of thousands of marchers from across America on Monday, I pray that your message will be heard and heeded on Capitol Hill and in State Houses across the nation. Legislators like myself need your strength and your courage to keep us strong in the fight against the travesty that Roe v. Wade has visited upon our land,” he wrote to the March for Life participants. “Your commitment to this cause and the March for Life in Washington on Monday inspire us to fight on, to hold up the Word of God as our guiding principle, and to speak out on behalf of the unborn.”

Also in 2000, Rogers completed a candidate questionnaire for the Michigan Catholic Conference in which he backed an initiative known as the “Human Life Amendment,” which would ban abortion from the moment of conception and enshrine fetal personhood in the Constitution. “I oppose abortion at any time except to save the live [sic] of the mother,” Rogers wrote. In response to a question about his position on the amendment, Rogers affirmed that he supported it, and he also wrote that he supported banning "the use of taxpayer funds for any abortions.”

The Human Life Amendment didn't just threaten abortion but also IVF and contraception. That’s what fetal personhood does: It accords legal personhood rights to embryos and fetuses and threatens fertility treatments that require the disposal of unused embryos, as well as whatever contraceptives anti-abortion activists decide to equate with “abortifacients.” At least in 2000, Rogers supported this.

In May and July of 2023, when asked about his opinion on a national abortion in two separate interviews, Rogers said he's been “a pro-life candidate my entire career,” but that he’d “have to look at it.” More recently, in May, he said he’d vote against a national abortion ban and wouldn’t threaten Michigan’s constitutional abortion right. But in 2013, Rogers voted in favor of a 20-week national abortion ban, which is still very much a national ban that could carry disparate harm for people experiencing medical emergencies and fetal conditions. The bill threatened doctors in violation with five years in prison.

In other increasingly close U.S. Senate races in states like Texas and Florida, Republican candidates are deploying Rogers’ same strategy of vaguely moderate posturing, despite, or possibly due to, their own contradictory records. In 2021, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) joined Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) to introduce a federal 20-week abortion ban. But, he's since been ignoring Texas newspapers’ multiple requests for comment on where he currently stands on a national abortion ban. Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) has similarly been dodging questions on a national ban, and flip-flopping on whether he supports Florida’s six or 15-week bans—but he, too, co-sponsored a national 20-week ban in 2020. They're all just following Donald Trump, who's publicly lying that he wouldn't enact a national abortion ban, all while the official Republican Party platform for 2024 affirms support for fetal personhood.

At this point, the GOP has proven they’ll say—or rather, not say—and do anything to win their elections at a time when outrage over abortion bans has become a driving force in the 2024 election. But we don’t have to wonder how Republicans like Rogers would hypothetically legislate if elected—we can look at what they’ve already said.