Yes, which is why the behavior that some conservatives exhibited is astonishing. Mitt made enemies of the NARAL crowd when he became governor of Massachusetts. His changed mind and behavior regarding the sanctity of life upset them very much.
But the right wing refused to see that, focusing instead on his attitude before he became pro-life.
Look, for many many years I was a liberal. Hell, I remember voting for Jesse Jackson. (ugh)
But I changed. No one who knows me now thinks I'm a lib. If one wants to take issue with my positions now, I'd hope it would be on my positions now, not the ones I had when I was a stupid liberal.
“But the right wing refused to see that, focusing instead on his attitude before he became pro-life.”
The newspaper ad in question focuses on Romney’s govt-mandated health plan, which provides a $50 co-pay for abortion on demand. Mitt signed that AFTER his alleged “evolution” on the life issue, which itself was implausible.
Forty million abortions of prenatal children during his adult lifetime, some of them developed enough to feel the horrific pain of it, hadn’t dented Romney’s 57-year old conscience sufficiently to make him stop promoting a woman’s “right to choose.”
But the thought of cells in a petri dish being discarded was just too overwhelming, too much for him to take? That made him finally realize Roe v Wade had “cheapened the value of human life”? Yeah, that’s believable.
Even more believable is that it was all based on political calculation. He just got caught several times AFTER — as with the healthcare plan — forgetting that he was supposed to be pro-life now.
Ironically, these same "conservatives" have no problem when their favorite Republican "conservative" candidate votes year after year to give money to Planned Parenthood, which simply uses trickery of accounting to use that taxpayer funding to conduct abortions.
It is sickening that so many conservatives here on FR, who I used to believe were logical and principaled, could be so venemous towards a good and decent man like Romney who had the courage to proclaim his mistake of the past.