I don’t think his 2002 position was based on a political calculation. I believe he actually supported abortion in 2002. He might have been “personally opposed” to the choice, but it is clear to me that he felt women had a RIGHT to abort, and therefore must have believed that abortion wasn’t really murder.
Romney didn’t come around to rejection of abortion as choice until at least 2005, which menas he is a very recent convert. As such, his conversion is suspect, and even as a Mitt supporter I would have preferred a candidate with a long history of being pro-life.
I understood why some people simply decided not to trust Romney — and I never argued that point, only that if you did trust that Romney had changed, his current positions were quite good from a conservative perspective.
Today of course we have Romneycare, and there’s no dismissing that as some old discarded position since Romney makes the mistake of defending it.
But it is telling that most of the attacks on Romney are for things he did years ago and that he has publicly repudiated. I understand not believing his repudiation, but I argue with those who IGNORE the repudiation and assert as FACT that Romney today is identical to the Romney of 2002, or 1994.
You may be right. After all, his mother took the libertarian position, too, and he may have been influenced by that.
You know, as Mormon, I don’t smoke because I think it is morally wrong, as well as just stupid. But I don’t believe in the law stepping in to stop other people from doing it. I don’t take that position with abortion, because I believe in protecting the unborn child. But I know some very staunch Mormons (usually men who have never carried a baby) who don’t get as worked up over abortion as I do, and would take the libertarian position, even though they would never have any part of it in their own lives.
But, there’s also no getting around the fact that Romney consistently counseled women in his ward and stake not to have abortions because it was wrong, and got slammed in the press for doing it. He took the pro-life position when there was an actual life at stake. Is that being pro-life? He just didn’t want the government to stop them. That’s not being pro-abortion. It’s being libertarian.
As to his position in Massachusetts, somebody else on this thread defended Reagan for SIGNING an abortion bill, not just pledging not to touch the law. They defended him because he had a Democrat legislature who could override the veto. To me, that would have been an argument FOR vetoing the bill. He was already elected. He could have vetoed it as a pro-life statement, if he felt that strongly about it at the time.
Romney was trying to get elected in a pro-choice state, where the Democrat legislature would have made any attempt to change abortion law impossible. That’s why taking the position that he wouldn’t attempt to change abortion law was a no-brainer. I just didn’t like the apparent enthusiasm with which he went about it.