In 2008, the issue that most dogged Mitt Romney’s Republican
presidential campaign was abortion. This time around, it has been
health care. Now the GOP frontrunner may have to face both
headaches at once.
This week, the Bay State’s biggest pro-life group launched a
ballot initiative to repeal the Obamacare-like health care law
Romney signed in 2006. Massachusetts Citizens for Life President
Anne Fox says, “It’s going to lead to the rationing of care, and
that’s what makes it a pro-life issue.”
So Fox’s organization has proposed a referendum question that
will allow Massachusetts voters to repeal the individual mandate
that is at the heart of the state law and its similarities to
Obamacare. Massachusetts Citizens for Life will need to gather
68,911 signatures by November and then another 11,485 signatures by
June for the initiative to make the ballot.
But in the meantime, the campaign calls attention to Romney’s
two biggest liabilities with the Republican base. And nothing
better illustrates Romney’s gymnastics on the abortion issue than
his complicated relationship with Massachusetts Citizens for
Life.
It goes all the way back to Romney’s first run for public
office. In 1994, Citizens for Life endorsed Romney for Senate. His
Republican primary opponent, John Lakian, was running to his left
on abortion. So was the Democratic incumbent, Ted Kennedy. Romney
was pro-choice, but supported parental notification laws, opposed
the Freedom of Choice Act, was against taxpayer funding of
abortion, and said he would not vote for a federal health care bill
that covered abortions.
After getting the Citizens for Life endorsement, Romney
subsequently modified or reversed all of these positions. The
group’s backing was helpful among a subset of Republican voters,
but it attracted the kind of attention Romney didn’t want in his
campaign against Kennedy. “Mitt Romney, stop pretending,” demanded
NARAL’s Kate Michelman. “We need honesty in our public life, not
your campaign of deception to conceal your anti-choice views.”
Romney said he might be able to back a different version of the
Freedom of Choice Act. His adviser Charles Manning told the
Boston Herald Romney “supports a federal health care
option that includes abortion services, would vote for a law
codifying the 1972 [sic] Roe v. Wade decision that
legalized abortion and backs federal funding for abortions as long
as states can decide they want the money.”
Most bizarrely, Manning even told a newspaper that Massachusetts
Citizens for Life had endorsed Romney because he had been
pro-choice longer than Ted Kennedy.
“[Kennedy] was pro-life before Roe v. Wade and now he’s
changed,” Manning said to the Boston Globe. “Mitt has
always been consistent in his pro-choice position and that’s why
the group respects him.”
Right.
After losing to Kennedy, Romney flirted with running for office
in Utah — and also seemed to flirt with becoming pro-life. In
2001, he wrote a letter to the Salt Lake Tribune saying he
didn’t wish to be called pro-choice. He called abortion “the wrong
choice,” but conceded “under the law, it is a choice people have.”
Romney never ended up becoming a candidate in Utah.
Instead Bay State Republicans convinced him to run for governor
in Massachusetts. His Democratic opponent, Shannon O’Brien, zinged
him on abortion. “Ted Kennedy said it best,” she remarked in an
October 2002 debate. “Mitt Romney isn’t pro-choice, he’s not
anti-choice, he’s multiple choice.”
Romney protested, “Let me make this very clear: I will preserve
and protect a woman’s right to choose.” So O’Brien brought up his
1994 endorsement by Massachusetts Citizens for Life. Romney denied
ever accepting the endorsement, sarcastically asking O’Brien if he
wrote them an acceptance letter. “When you say I accepted it, in
what way did I accept it, Shannon?” he asked. Massachusetts
Citizens for Who?
Three years later, Romney wrote in the Boston Globe, “I
am prolife. I believe that abortion is the wrong choice except in
cases of incest, rape, and to save the life of the mother.” This
may as well have been the announcement of his campaign for the
Republican presidential nomination. Before leaving office as
governor, he became a Massachusetts Citizens for Life donor.
Fox is interested in repealing the Massachusetts health care
law, not revisiting any of this history or bashing Romney. She
defends him against the charge that he is responsible for taxpayer
funding of abortion in the commonwealth, pointing out that it was
actually the Supreme Judicial Court that mandated such funding when
it struck down the Doyle-Flynn law, which was Massachusetts’
equivalent of the Hyde Amendment. She is even willing to say it was
reasonable to think Romneycare might have worked out better, given
the state’s low percentage of uninsured before the law took
hold.
“We all thought it was going to be good,” Fox says. “We really
don’t fault Romney. We don’t fault the legislature.” But now is
time to look at results, not intentions.
“The fault is that Massachusetts isn’t rethinking [the law] now
and the federal government is headed down the same path,” Fox adds.
She opposes Romney’s health care law, but not Romney himself.
“If Romney is the nominee against Obama, he’s our man,” says
Fox. But if he doesn’t disavow Romneycare, which she calls “the
prototype” for the national law, “I think he will hurt his chances
of being nominated.”
