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2007-12: The Final Whitewash

Beyond establishing his pro-life identity, Romney the presidential candidate has shown little interest in abortion. In February 2007, George Stephanopoulos asked him, “If it's killing, why should states have leeway?” Romney answered: “There are a lot of things that are morally very difficult, and in some cases repugnant, that we let states decide. For instance, Nevada allows prostitution. I find that to be quite repugnant as a practice.” (You can watch Romney’s answer here.) Months later, when Tim Russert asked what punishment doctors should get for performing abortions, Romney—who had previously proposed long jail terms for cloning embryos—said the penalties for abortion “would be potentially losing a license or having some other kind of restriction.” Romney has never treated abortion as killing. To him, it’s a cultural problem, like turning tricks. In speeches to socially conservative audiences from 2006 to 2008, he rarely mentioned abortion, preferring to talk about gay marriage. In 2011 and 2012, he has said even less.

Of all Romney’s revisions, the boldest is his effort to imply that he deliberately governed as a pro-lifer. The record, as documented above, shows that Romney ran for governor in 2002 as a man who would protect the right to choose abortion because he believed in that right, regardless of politics. Then, in 2005, he reinterpreted his pledge as a neutrality pact with the state’s pro-choice majority. “We're going to maintain the status quo,” he told reporters in June 2005. “It's a moratorium, if you will, on change.” Romney reaffirmed that position in July 2005, when he vetoed the bill to distribute morning-after pills: “I pledged that I would not change our abortion laws either to restrict abortion or to facilitate it.”

That was the last directly life-related bill Romney faced. There were later controversies overabortion coverage in Romneycare, conscience exemptions for distributing morning-after pills, and broadening the eligibility rules for recipients of state-funded family planning. But these legal and administrative questions didn’t fundamentally challenge or illuminate the governor’s moral position on life. Once Romney stepped down as governor in January 2007, his inbox was closed. Since the two bills that had reached his desk were opposed by pro-lifers, he could claim a perfect pro-life record. And he did.

On June 15, 2007, Romney spoke at the National Right to Life Convention, an important venue for Republican presidential candidates. He cast himself as a true believer inspired to action by his 2004 epiphany: “A moment of decision became a defining moment. And so, every time I faced a decision as governor that related to life, I came down on the side of life.” Romney repeated this line in several presidential debates. In January 2008, he proclaimed, “I came down on the side of life consistently as governor, in every way I knew how I could do that.”

Romney wasn’t attributing this record to luck. He was claiming credit for having chosen the pro-life course at every opportunity. He had transformed himself, in retrospect, from pro-choice to neutral to pro-life. Apparently, he thought his new story couldn’t be falsified, since he would never have to face a pro-life bill.

He was wrong. Dan Balz had kept the recording of his February 2005 interview with Romney. In a part of the interview that wasn’t published at the time, Romney said his press aide

came to me the other day and said there's a new bill coming up with regards to a particular matter. And I said, “Don't tell me what it does. I will veto it.” It relates to choice and abortion. I said, “I don't know whether it's pro-life or pro-choice. I said I would not support any change in the law while I was governor.” … Whether it's one that conforms with my own personal view or whether it conforms to someone else’s view, I've said, “Nothing while I’m governor.”

You can listen to the recording here. It confirms that three months after his epiphany and two weeks after he came out against cloning, Romney had told his staff he would veto pro-life legislation. Which means the story he told pro-lifers in 2007 was false.

And that wasn’t the only duplicity in Romney’s 2007 address to the right-to-life convention. He also told the crowd:

Recently, I was attacked by one of my opponents because when I ran for governor I promised to maintain the status quo with regards to laws relating to abortion in Massachusetts. Of course, I kept that promise. But in Massachusetts, that meant vetoing pro-choice legislation.

Essentially, Romney was saying he had tricked pro-choice voters in 2002. He had framed his no-change policy as preserving a woman’s right to choose, knowing all the while that everything he did as governor would limit that right. But to Romney, this deception was OK, since he had technically kept his promise.