Dana Nessel launches re-election with birth control ad that stretches facts

LANSING — Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel launched her re-election campaign Friday with a promise to "keep politicians out of your bedroom" and protect access to birth control.

A new ad from the first-term Democrat features footage of Republican challengers criticizing a 1965 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that prohibited states from banning contraceptives. 

Former House Speaker Tom Leonard, attorney Matt DePerno and state Rep. Ryan Berman did not say they actually oppose access to birth control. But in a Feb. 18 debate, they said the federal ruling trampled on “states’ rights.”

If one of them wins in November, "you might have to cross state lines just to legally have safe sex, and Lansing could decide when and if you have kids," Nessel claims in the ad, which is set to debut on television Friday morning during Good Morning America and The View. 

Nessel is no stranger to provocative campaign commercials. As a first-time candidate in 2018, she made national news with an ad saying that, as a woman, she was the candidate voters could most trust “not to show you their penis.”

Related:

• Michigan AG candidate Matt DePerno gets his moment at Trump’s Mar-A-Lago
• Robert Regan, under fire for rape comments, also espoused QAnon, violence
• 2022 Michigan petition drives tracker: What to know about election proposals

Her new commercial echoes arguments she made last month after Republicans debated the Supreme Court ruling in Griswold v. Connecticut, a state that had prohibited people from using any drug or other intervention to prevent conception. 

Justices invalidated the Connecticut law and others like it for violating the "right to marital privacy." The privacy precedent was important to future decisions like Roe v. Wade, which guaranteed a right to abortion before a fetus is viable.

"My problem with Griswold isn't the result — of course states shouldn't ban contraceptives — but rather how the Supreme Court got there," Leonard told Bridge Michigan in a statement last month.

"Our rights should be grounded in the Constitution's text and tradition, not a judge's feelings. That's just common sense to everyone except fringe culture war activists like Dana Nessel."

Berman, who acknowledged in the debate that he did not know the case well, later told Bridge he does not think Michigan should ban birth control.  "I’m not opposed to contraception, nor to individual privacy rights," he said Feb. 21.

Only DePerno, who is best known for challenging results of the 2020 presidential election, has not clarified his stance on birth control since the February debate.

"Dana Nessel was taught a lesson of what standing up for states’ rights means," DePerno campaign manager Tyson Shepard said at the time. "Defending the constitution and states rights from federal overreach is a critical responsibility of the AG's office and duty that she has failed at miserably.”

Republicans are set to endorse their attorney general nominee at an April 24 convention. 

Nessel and her re-election campaign are questioning how far the Republican candidates are willing to take their states’ rights argument. She’s noted the Supreme Court also struck down state laws that had segregated schools, prohibited interracial marriage and banned same-sex marriage.

"If they believe a landmark case like Griswold was wrongly decided on the basis of states’ rights, we’d love to hear if they feel the same about other seminal decisions that form the backbone of U.S. civil rights law," Nessel spokesperson Sarah Stevenson said Friday in a statement announcing the re-election ad.

"There are certain decisions that should be left up to states to make, but a person’s fundamental right to privacy in their own bedroom is not one of them."

The ad suggests Nessel intends to make reproductive rights a key part of her re-election campaign, highlighting an issue that could come to a head this year if the increasingly conservative U.S. Supreme Court reverses Roe v. Wade. 

If that happens, Nessel has said she would not enforce a 1931 abortion ban that remains on the books in Michigan. Most Republican candidates for attorney general and governor have said they oppose legal abortion and would enforce the old state ban if Roe v. Wade is overturned.