page_title: Michele Bachmann
section_title: Family
hierarchical_section_title: Michele Bachmann / Personal life / Family
caption_attribution_description: English: Marcus Bachmann with his wife Michele Bachmann at the 2011 Time 100 gala.
context_page_description: Michele Marie Bachmann is an American politician and a member of the Republican Party. She represented Minnesota's 6th congressional district in the United States House of Representatives from 2007 to 2015. The district includes St. Cloud and several of the northern suburbs of the Twin Cities.
  Bachmann was a candidate for the Republican nomination in the 2012 U.S. presidential election, winning the Ames Straw Poll in August 2011 but dropping out in January 2012 after finishing in sixth place in the Iowa caucuses. She previously served in the Minnesota Senate and is the first Republican woman to represent Minnesota in Congress. She is a supporter of the Tea Party movement and a founder of the House Tea Party Caucus.
context_section_description: In 1978, Amble married Marcus Bachmann, now a clinical therapist with a master's degree from Regent University and a Ph.D. from Union Graduate School, whom she met while they were undergraduates. After she received an LL.M. in taxation from William & Mary School of Law in 1988, the couple moved to Stillwater, Minnesota, a town of 18,000 near Saint Paul, where they run a Christian counseling center that provided gay conversion therapy. Bachmann and her husband have five children: Lucas, Harrison, Elisa, Caroline, and Sophia. In a 2011 town hall meeting, she said that she suffered a miscarriage after the birth of their second child, Harrison, an event she said shaped her anti-abortion views.
  Bachmann and her husband have also provided foster care to 23 other children, all teenage girls. The Bachmanns were licensed from 1992 to 2000 to handle up to three foster children at a time; the last child arrived in 1998. The Bachmanns began by providing short-term care for girls with eating disorders who were patients in a University of Minnesota program. The Bachmann home was legally defined as a treatment home, with a daily reimbursement rate per child from the state. Some girls stayed a few months, others more than a year.
  Bachmann is a former beauty pageant queen.
caption: Husband Marcus Bachmann and Michele at the 2011 Time 100 gala, where Michele was an honoree
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