It seems lieutenant governor hopeful Jay DeBoyer just couldn’t help himself.

These days, GOP candidates aren’t supposed to admit they want to ban abortion. At least, not Republican candidates who want to win statewide in Michigan, and not where people can hear … or make surreptitious recordings that later make wind up in reporters’ inboxes.

But here’s DeBoyer, a sitting state GOP rep from Clay Township and the running mate of GOP gubernatorial candidate John James, apparently caught on tape telling attendees at a Sept. 12 event in Battle Creek that rewriting the state constitution may be the only way to ban some abortions and save “some of the babies.”

The audio was initially reported by the Detroit News; the Detroit Free Press independently obtained and reviewed a recording. A James campaign spokesperson didn’t respond to a text message seeking to confirm the veracity of the recording, but in comments to other media outlets, has not challenged its legitimacy, so I’m proceeding in the reasonable belief that this is authentic audio, fairly representing the positions DeBoyer – and James, for that matter – have previously expressed.

Before 2022, that is.

That’s the year a whopping 57% of Michiganders voters cast ballots in favor of abortion rights, Democrats incentivized at least in part by the U.S. Supreme Court’s overturn of Roe v. Wade won a governing trifecta for the first time in 40 years ‒ and Republicans learned that in statewide elections, opposition to abortion rights was a non-starter.

So they stopped talking about it.

Well. Most of them.

“I’m going to talk about this really quick,” DeBoyer told event attendees, “and I know they always tell politicians, at this point, abortion is, like, one of those things in Michigan, but …”

Boy, is it.

What the tape revealed

On the Nov. 3 ballot, Michiganders will be asked whether to authorize a convention to rewrite the state constitution, a question placed on the ballot every 16 years, and voted down in each previous instance by wide but shrinking margins.

Because liberals have “weaponized” constitutional amendments, DeBoyer said on the recording, rewriting the state constitution may be the only way to restrict abortion.

DeBoyer told the group that Republicans who would’ve rejected a 12-week ban in 2022 as inadequate would back writing such a provision into the state constitution now.

Another person interjects: “They” – that’s Democrats – “accept one bite of the apple at a time. … We always want to swallow them whole.”

DeBoyer responds: “The reason is because we run on morals and principles, right? And those morals and principles are not compromised. They don’t run on morals and principles. They run on feelings, and so those feelings can sway based on how many beers you had yesterday, right? They just they swing to whatever makes them feel good, right? And that’s the difference between Republicans and Democrats, or conservatives and liberals, right?”

DeBoyer clarified in the recording that he is a “staunch pro-life individual,” who is “not, like, pro-abortion at all, like, zero,” but added, “We’ve gone so hard left, so hard left, that, it’s, you never take it back in one bite. It’s incremental. You got to take a little bit back, and a little bit back, and a little bit back, and a little bit back. You know.”A 12-week ban, he said, “would improve the problem,” and might be “our only way to make some of these modifications.”

“… At the end of the day, I still don’t know how I’m going to vote on the (constitutional convention) proposal, but those are the mental exercises that I go through while I’m thinking about that stuff.”

Michigan Republicans didn’t change their abortion views, they changed the way they talk about them

The 2022 election was a daunting moment for foes of reproductive rights. Having succeeded in its half-century campaign to overturn the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Roe v. Wade, which found state level abortion bans unconstitutional, the pro-life movement now had to live with the political environment it had wrought.

Led by the ACLU of Michigan and Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, reproductive rights advocates hustled to get Proposal 3 on the fall ballot, ensuring that Michigan women retained the full autonomy and personhood conferred by Roe. It passed with two-thirds of the vote.

In endorsement interviews two years later with the Detroit Free Press Editorial Board, a series of Republican candidates ‒ then-U.S. Senate candidate Mike Rogers, back this year for another crack at an open seat; U.S. Rep. John James, now running for governor; U.S. Rep. Tom Barrett, running for re-election in the 7th District; 8th District U.S. House candidate Paul Junge, who lost ‒ insisted that abortion was no longer an issue, now that it had been OK’d at the state level. All four of the men were endorsed that year by Right To Life of Michigan. In this election cycle, James and Barrett have again won the group’s endorsement, along with nearly every Republican on the ballot.

James called abortion “genocide” in 2018 (caught on tape at a campaign event that year … noticing a theme?) and has said he doesn’t believe it’s acceptable even in cases of incest.

Rogers, as a member of the U.S. House, sponsored legislation to take abortion medication off the market; more than half of abortions performed in the U.S. are medical, not surgical.

Barrett, during his tenure in the state House, sponsored or backed legislation banning abortion around six weeks, and in 2021 co-sponsored legislation that urged criminal prosecution of doctors and nurses who perform abortions.

In other words, men who’d spent decades not just loudly opposing abortion, but working to limit or de facto ban it, are remarkably sanguine about the procedure. Abortion had always been a matter for states to regulate, each said, seeming to claim that their objections had been rooted in process, not morality.

I suppose it’s possible that each had a road-to-Damascus-style revelation, but we ought to at least consider that this recalibration on abortion is actually a cynical ploy to win votes in a purple state where voters have drawn a clear line in the sand about reproductive rights and female autonomy.

By Sept. 14, DeBoyer had gotten back with the program, telling the News in an interview that “the abortion issue is settled in Michigan.”

Abortion rights are still on the ballot

After the 2024 presidential election, when President Donald Trump won Michigan by a narrow margin, it was fashionable in some circles to speculate, at least briefly, that voters here are no longer motivated by threats to abortion or reproductive rights.

It was a profound misread of the moment. Michigan voters haven’t abandoned reproductive rights. Democrats simply didn’t convince voters that abortion was on the 2024 presidential ballot.

Did abortion rights lose salience after the 2022 overturn of Roe v. Wade? Well, yes. Depending on where you live, one of two things happened that year: Blue states without laws protecting reproductive rights, and even some red states, hustled to pass them, usually by margins of 10 points or more. Including four states where voters chose Trump in 2024 and voted to protect abortion on the same ballot ‒ most abortions are even legal in six of the seven battleground states Trump won in that year. And in most red states, most abortions are now illegal, thanks to trigger laws passed in anticipation of Roe’s demise. Across the country, the preferences of most voters in any given jurisdiction align with majoritarian political outcomes, and voters of either stripe tended to view the matter as settled.

It’s not. The Trump administration is adopting rules intended to limit access to contraception, and has successfully curtailed funding for women’s health clinics, forcing the closure of three in metro Detroit this year.

Women’s right to bodily autonomy, to manage our own health care decisions and to claim full humanity was on the ballot in 2024. It’s on the ballot in 2026, and in 2028, and every year after that.

DeBoyer just reminded us of that.

Nancy Kaffer is the editorial page editor of the Detroit Free Press. Submit a letter to the editor at freep.com/letters, and we may publish it in print or online.

This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: John James’ running mate just put abortion back on the ballot | Opinion

Reporting by Nancy Kaffer, Detroit Free Press / Detroit Free Press

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