Opinion: Michigan Republican candidates are suddenly chill about abortion this election

One thing I never expected to encounter in this year's election: A lock-step cadre of Republican Congressional candidates who just aren't that fussed about abortion.

As a member of the Detroit Free Press Editorial Board, I've participated in hundreds of interviews with candidates seeking the newspaper's endorsement. Over the last 12 years, support for abortion rights and the autonomy of women to make decisions about our own bodies has been the distinguishing issue between Democrats and Republicans. Yes, yes, there's a lot of other stuff the parties disagree on, but this one was a bright line.

This year, every Republican candidate for U.S. Congress we've interviewed has insisted that abortion simply isn't a concern. That his previous staunch anti-abortion advocacy and/or voting record isn't a factor anymore, and that all he ever really wanted was for the question of abortion to be returned to the states — you know, even some Democrats thought that Roe v. Wade, the U.S. Supreme Court's 1974 decision that made state laws banning abortion unconstitutional, was wrongly decided — and now, two years after Michigan voters sent a clear message to candidates that opposition to abortion rights loses elections, it's just not an issue.

Maybe this seems a little suspicious to you? Yeah, me too.

Endorsements: Free Press picks for Michigan US House, Senate and House in Nov. 5 election

Let me explain

Two years ago, the Supreme Court overturned Roe, thanks to a slew of Republican justices appointed by former President Donald Trump and a long-term right-wing legal strategy that ran case after case attacking abortion rights through the court system. In Michigan, that meant a 1931 law never taken off the books would have become enforceable again, making abortions illegal in almost all circumstances and allowing for the criminal prosecution of the doctors and nurses who performed them.

The joy among Michigan Republicans was palpable.

And short-lived.

In overturning Roe, the GOP had caught the proverbial tiger by the tail. Impotently railing against abortion was safe. Running for office as an anti-abortion rights candidate in a post-Roe world was not.

See, female autonomy, and the right of women to control when, whether and if we have children, is a pretty big deal. The ACLU of Michigan and Gov. Gretchen Whitmer filed a pair of lawsuits asking the courts to find the 1931 law unconstitutional, and to block its enforcement until the cases were decided. A group called Reproductive Freedom for All hustled to get Proposal 3, an amendment to enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution, on the November 2022 ballot.

Prop 3 was also a political litmus test: Did most Michiganders truly favor abortion rights? And would threats to female autonomy drive voters to the polls?

The answer to both was a resounding "yes." That November, 56% of Michigan voters approved Prop 3, a wider margin of victory than even Whitmer enjoyed, and swept a vocally pro-choice Democratic majority into both chambers of the state Legislature, the first time in 40 years the party had won unilateral control. Republicans spent decades telling us abortion was controversial, and too many times, Democrats nodded along, deferential to a notion neither polling nor common sense supported.

Abortion rights aren't really about abortion. Most women — even most pro-choice women — will never terminate a pregnancy. But almost all of us want to make such decisions for ourselves. Physical autonomy is intrinsic to personhood and citizenship, and it's a right to self-determination that American men have never had to ask their friends and neighbors to approve. Put simply: If women aren't the final authorities about what happens to our own bodies, then we aren't quite as human as men.

High stakes in the Great Lakes state

Prop 3 proved conclusively that opposing abortion was a losing issue. And Republicans want to win.

This year, Michigan, is home to a nail-biter of a U.S. Senate race and three of the nation's most competitive U.S. House races:

• The 7th District, where Democrat Curtis Hertel and Republican Tom Barrett are vying to replace U.S. Rep. Elissa Slotkin, D-Holly, who is running for Michigan's open U.S. Senate seat against former Republican Congressman Mike Rogers

• The 8th District, where state Sen. Kristen McDonald Rivet, D-Bay City, and Republican Paul Junge are running to replace retiring Democratic U.S. Rep. Dan Kildee

• And the 10th, where retired judge and county prosecutor Carl Marlinga, a Democrat, hopes to unseat one-term incumbent U.S. Rep. John James, R-Shelby Township

All four of these Republican candidates have developed a startlingly laissez-faire approach to abortion rights.

Let's go to the tape

It's a bad idea for columnists to attempt to peer inside another person's head, and you ought to be suspicious of any journalist who claims to know what anyone else is really thinking. So let's review the record (thoroughly reported by Bridge Michigan's Jordyn Hermani):

Senate candidate Mike Rogers served in the U.S. Congress from 2001-2015. While there, he co-sponsored legislation that would have written into federal law the unscientific claim that human life begins at conception. He supported a 20-week national abortion ban. He twice co-sponsored legislation to take Mifepristone, an abortion medication that is now under attack in the courts, off the market. (Most terminations in the U.S. are medical, not surgical.) Running for the state Legislature in 1994, Rogers said abortions were only permissible to save the life of the mother.

But earlier this summer, he told the Free Press Editorial Board that he wouldn't vote for a federal abortion ban, because abortion is now legislated by the states.

During his tenure in the state Legislature, 7th District candidate Tom Barrett sponsored or backed proposals that would ban abortion after a fetal heartbeat could be detected — that happens at about 5 1/2 or 6 weeks, before most women know they are pregnant — to ban D&E (dilation and evacuation), a procedure rarely used to end pregnancies, and more commonly as life-saving medical care for women who have miscarried. Barrett called D&E procedures "gruesome and barbaric." He co-sponsored a 2021 resolution that urged criminal prosecution, if Roe were to fall, of doctors and nurses under the 1931 law. Challenging Slotkin in 2022, Barrett sent out a fundraising mailer boasting that he was "100% PRO-LIFE - NO EXCEPTIONS."

In an endorsement interview with the editorial board this month, he, too, said it's different now that abortion is legislated by the states.

Paul Junge, running in Michigan's 8th District, has no political experience. But during his unsuccessful 2020 run for the U.S. Congress, he declared that the high court "made up rights" when deciding Roe, and said "defending the right to life" was a top issue that year, a claim he made again in 2022.

You'll be shocked to hear that earlier this summer, he told the editorial board that he wouldn't vote for a national abortion ban, because he believes it's a "states' issue."

Then there's the 10th District's John James, elected in 2022. He's also described himself as "100% pro-life," called abortion "genocide" in 2018 and said in 2022 that he doesn't support abortion even in cases of rape or incest.

James' campaign didn't respond to emails inviting him to an endorsement interview, but during an April appearance on WDIV-TV's Flashpoint, he told host Devin Scillian Democrats' claims that abortion rights were in jeopardy were "fear-mongering," now that reproductive rights are part of our state constitution. Besides, he assured Scillian, even if such a ban were introduced, "it has no chance of passing” ? thanks, James explained, to the Democratic majority in the U.S. Senate.

Paging Right to Life

Your choices, my friends, are these: To believe that each candidate has undergone a dizzying ethical reversal, coming to the conclusion that problem with abortion was not moral, but procedural — which itself ought to merit interrogation — or to suspect that each is conducting an exercise in prevarication, intended to get himself elected.

At which point, should the circumstances arise, you might further suspect that each man would cheerfully vote to enact a national abortion ban, yank mifepristone from the market or vote in favor of other restrictive measures consistent with the strongly held anti-abortion beliefs he expressed over years in public life — before the Supreme Court tanked Roe and Michiganders voted for abortion rights.

People are complicated, and sometimes even strongly held beliefs change. So it’s possible that first scenario is true.

But if it is, someone really ought to tell the folks at Michigan Right to Life, who don't seem to have gotten the message: The stridently anti-abortion-rights group is endorsing all four men.

Nancy Kaffer is the editorial page editor of the Detroit Free Press. Contact: [email protected]. Submit a letter to the editor at freep.com/letters and we may publish it online and in print.

This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Opinion: GOP candidates change their tune on abortion in Michigan