A Trump-endorsed candidate for secretary of state in Michigan once proclaimed that abortions were akin to “child sacrifice”, CNNfirst reported.

“Abortion is really nothing new. The child sacrifice is a very satanic practice, and that’s precisely what abortion is. And we need to see it as such,” Kristina Karamo, 36, a community college professor, said during a recording of her podcast, It’s Solid Food, back in October 2020, before Donald Trump endorsed her.

“When people in other cultures, when they engage in child sacrifice, they didn’t just sacrifice the child for the sake of bloodshed,” she added later in the segment. “They sacrificed the child cause they were hoping to get prosperity and that’s precisely why people have abortion now. ‘Because I’m not ready. I don’t wanna have a baby. I don’t feel like it. I don’t have time. I wanna make more money. I want my freedom.’”

She went further in the episode to claim that by “sacrificing” foetuses during an abortion procedure, people who make that choice are, by her assessment, striving to “get something out of their death”.

“Which is your freedom, your happiness, your prosperity,” she said, adding that abortions, which were up until last month a constitutionally protected procedure for nearly the past 50 years, were “the greatest crime of our nation’s history”.

The Independent has reached out to Ms Karamo’s campaign for comment on the remarks first dredged up by CNN but did not hear back from her immediately.

Ms Karamo, who has served on the board of Michigan’s Right to Life organisation and describes herself as being a devout Christian, is the presumed Republican challenger to the Democratic Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, who first assumed the position in 2018 and hopes to make this final bid for the office her second and final four-year term.

The Republican challenger first made herself known on Mr Trump’s radar after the 2020 presidential election, when she began lodging allegations that she’d bared witness to unverified election fraud at the polls in Detroit where she was working as a poll challenger that November, according to Bridge Michigan.

She submitted an affidavit of the “incident” in a lawsuit she filed that sought to overturn the official results. Among some of the widely debunked claims pushed by the Republican secretary of state candidate was one where she said she saw an election supervisor tell clerks to “push through” ballots that were likely to be Democratic.

Michigan, alongside Arizona and Nevada, all considered battleground states in the 2020 election, have all seen America First candidates throw their name in the race for secretary of state, typically a state’s third-highest ranking public official who is also responsible for overseeing elections.

And with the 2020 results in Michigan being decided by a considerably small number of ballots, a secretary of state, such as the Trump-backed Ms Karamo, who has promised to continue investigating the former US president’s election fraud claim, could have enormous sway in the 2024 election outcome if she oversees the final count in a state that was essential for both the winning campaigns of Donald Trump and Joe Biden in 2016 and 2020, respectively.

Ms Karamo’s previous bid for public office in 2018, when she unsuccessfully ran to serve as Oakland County Commissioner for the 10th District, led to her gaining less than 40 per cent of the total vote in the Republican primary.