Wisconsin Senate Debate: Barnes Dodges Question about Abortion Limits
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Wisconsin lieutenant governor Mandela Barnes on Thursday skirted a debate question about what limits he would support on abortion.
Moderators at Barnes’s second and final debate with incumbent Senator Ron Johnson (R., Wis.) asked the Democrat “at what point do you think life should be protected, and what exemptions would you support.”
Barnes’s lengthy answer did not include a specific point at which he would support limits. Instead, he told the story of an audience member who was joyously expecting twins before she discovered what she believed to be twins was actually one baby with a cancerous tumor forming.
“She had some very difficult conversations, conversations she never expected to have, and she had an abortion,” he said. “That was her choice to make. In Ron Johnson’s America, women don’t get to make the best choice for their health; rape victims . . . don’t get to make the choices for themselves. That’s the unfortunate reality.”
Barnes said only that he supports returning to the standard created under Roe v. Wade: “That was the law of the land that worked for 50 years, and Roe also allowed for some restrictions, but the reality is it has strong protections for the health and the life of the mother, and that’s what we should be moving towards.”
Barnes’s comments come less than a week after he held a “Rally for Roe” in Milwaukee, after which he told National Review that he opposes any legal limit on abortion throughout all nine months of pregnancy.
National Review asked Barnes if abortion should be legal or illegal if a pregnancy that is past the point of viability does not pose a risk to the physical health of the mother.
“It all goes back to this decision being made between a woman and her doctor,” he said. “That’s as simple as it gets.”
“So even when there’s no physical threat to the mother’s life, and the baby’s healthy after viability?” National Review asked.
Barnes replied: “I used Texas as an example yesterday. When there’s a complication with a pregnancy, who gets to determine if there is a complication? Who exactly knows? That’s why it’s important for a woman to be able to make that decision with her doctor. Ron Johnson doesn’t have a medical degree.”
Wisconsin’s law on abortion explicitly says that its abortion ban “does not apply to a therapeutic abortion which: (a) Is performed by a physician; and (b) Is necessary, or is advised by 2 other physicians as necessary, to save the life of the mother.”
Meanwhile on Thursday, Johnson said his view is that abortion is a “profound moral issue” and that he would propose a one-time, single-issue referendum to decide at what point society has the responsibility to protect life, balancing the rights of the mother with the rights of an unborn child.
Johnson and Barnes clashed over crime earlier in the debate.
Barnes argued it is “absurd when people say that I’m soft on crime,” saying there is “nothing I’m more deeply passionate about.”
He argued that reducing crime is about making sure that law enforcement and communities have strong relationships, as well as taking steps to prevent crime, including investing in good schools and good-paying jobs.
Moderators asked the two candidates what they would say to the parents of 12-year-old Olivia Schultz, who was fatally shot outside her home on Monday while helping her mother bring groceries in. Schultz was the 20th child to be killed in Milwaukee County this year. Her mother, who was injured in the shooting, told local reporters she feels as if she is living in a war zone.
Barnes blamed the city’s gun violence on politicians who are “bought and paid for by the gun lobby” and accused his opponent of being in gun lobbyists’ pockets.
Johnson spoke about trying to keep violent criminals in jail, noting that Barnes and Governor Tony Evers set a goal of reducing the prison population by 50 percent.
Barnes’s campaign said in February that he still supports legislation he introduced in 2016 as a member of the state assembly that would have ended “monetary bail as a condition of release” for criminal defendants and prohibited judges from detaining defendants based on the “nature, number and gravity” of the charges.
Under the proposal, a judge would be required to release a defendant unless there was “clear and convincing evidence” that he was a flight risk or a danger to an individual or a witness.
“One of the things you use is cash bail, and there is an effort here to eliminate cash bail, but also we have to support law enforcement,” Johnson said, calling out Barnes over a recent report that the Democrat did six interviews with the Russian state-controlled TV network RT between 2015 and 2016 in which he strongly criticized American police.
Barnes officially came out against defunding the police in January. Yet Heather Smith from the Wisconsin-based John K. MacIver Institute for Public Policy says Barnes is trying to rewrite history and “gaslight” the public on the issue.
Barnes, whose campaign has received funding from five groups that support defunding the police, tweeted in July 2020: “Defunding the police only dreams of being as radical as a Donald Trump pardon.”
