The two had NOTHING to do with each other.
his claim to have been pro-life all along is actually pretty similar to Romney's.
No, Romney signed into law a socialist healthcare plan that included taxpayer-funded abortion AFTER his supposed conversion.
It seems that all of the candidates are now trying to portray themselves as being the most "Reaganesque" and that's fine -- but they need to be prepared to be called to task for their deficiencies. To call Romney "Reaganesqe" only makes sense when he is being compared to Rudy, and that's not saying much.
“Given that Reagan did sign a key bill which led pretty directly to the Court issuing Roe, his claim to have been pro-life all along is actually pretty similar to Romney’s.”
The first part of this sentence is false. Roe was a case that worked its way up from the Texas courts.
The second part of your sentence, thus, is false, in that the premise is false.
However, it's also a non sequitur. The plain language of the 1967 bill was very restrictive. In hindsight, folks know now that liberal courts will interpret the "grave health" exception to mean a wide variety of things. I don't know why folks would assume that Mr. Reagan would have known prior to signing that the courts would abuse the language of the law in that way. Thus, it isn't logical to impute to Mr. Reagan's political philosophy the unforeseen consequences of his action.
The difficulty with the rest of your post is that it entirely ignores context.
In 1967, no abortions at all were legal in California. The legislation that Mr. Reagan signed permitted abortion in limited circumstances, what folks often call the hard cases.
Although I'm one of them, VERY FEW FOLKS want to ban absolutely every single abortion, we call folks pro-life who want to ban the 96+% of abortions that are NOT involved in cases or rape, incest, and the life of the mother.
Mr. Reagan's position THEN, as evidenced by the actual language of the legislation that he signed, was about as pro-life as most pro-lifers are TODAY. However, by the time Mr. Romney was governor, the general “law” of the land, as dictated to us by the Supreme Court, was already far more liberal than anything that Mr. Reagan ever signed. In fact, Mr. Reagan’s legislation was actually voided by Roe in that it was far too restrictive of abortion under the Roe and Doe legal regime imposed by the Supreme Court.
If Mr. Romney proposed to sign a bill that would have limited abortion to cases of rape, incest, and the life of the mother, I’d have called Mr. Romney a pro-lifer, too.
But by the time he was governor, abortion on demand was already the legal regime of the day.
“No one ever made Reagan crawl through the primaries, wearing sackcloth and covering himself in ashes. He said he was pro-life. We accepted that.”
Certainly, because his ACTUAL actions were that of a moderate pro-lifer, someone willing to accept limited access to abortion in limited circumstances.
What is the evidence of this? The actual language of the actual legislation that he actually signed, permitting abortion in cases of rape, incest, and “grave health” risk of the mother.
That is actually the position of most pro-lifers, except that in hindsight (which is 20/20), folks know that any exception past “life of the mother” will be abused.
sitetest