A Republican nominee for Michiganattorney general recently said in a recorded conversation that he supported Plan B pills being stopped "at the border" and treated like fentanyl.
In a recording shared by Heartland Signal, Michigan attorney general nominee Matt DePerno can be heard talking to a man who voices concern for abortion laws in the state and later asks about Plan B pills.
The man asking Mr DePerno the questions was reportedly a Democratic activist posing as a Republican constituent, according to the Heartland Signal.
Mr DePerno initially asks what Plan B pills are, but seems to recognise the drug once the man he's speaking to calls it the "morning after pill”.
In the recording, the man notes that he saw Mr DePerno on "War Room”, former Trump adviser Steve Bannon's podcast, before asking him if its possible to ban the Plan B pill.
"You've got to figure out how you ban the pill in the state," Mr DePerno says. "How do you stop it from coming in? You have to stop it at the border. It would be no different than, like, fentanyl."
Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid that is often added to heroin to boost its potency and contributed to many of the overdose deaths attributed to the opioid epidemic.
He goes on to say that "it's a state issue”.
"The state has to ban it. And it should be banned. It's just an issue of how do you enforce it," he says.
Mr DePerno previously said during a primary debate that he believed that the legality of contraception sales to adults should be left up to the states to decide.
Michigan's reproductive rights are on the ballot this year. Not only is Mr DePerno, who is running for the state's top law enforcement job, on the record as opposing abortion, but the Republican nominee for governor, Tudor Dixon, is also opposed.
Ms Dixon said she opposes abortion with the exception for when the mother's life was at stake. In August, she told a reporter that a woman who gave birth to a child brought about through rape could experience "healing" through the experience.
Mr DePerno is currently one of several Republican officials that Democratic attorney general Dana Nessel is asking a state agency to consider charges against for an alleged plot by GOP members to access state voting machines during the 2020 election.
Ms Nessel is running against Mr DePerno in the upcoming election.
Mr DePerno is a Donald Trump loyalist who repeated the former president's false claims that the 2020 election had been stolen. Allegations the state attorney general made against him last month name him as one of the "prime instigators" of a plan to gain improper access to voting machines in an attempt to dispute the 2020 election.
He has denied all accusations of wrongdoing. The Associated Press reports that he called the investigation one "purely based on political prosecution" and that “90% of the facts that [Ms Nessel] lays out, that she calls facts in her petition, are either false or I have no knowledge of what she’s talking about.”
