He's moving Ridge to another position; this allows for maybe a pro-life replacement to take his place in PA.
True, I doubt you'll see the pro-life organizations complain when Lt. Governor (soon to be acting Governor) Mark Schweiker spends the next year and a half signing pro-life legislation from the Pennsyvania legislature that Ridge vetoed.
Furthermore, why is it that we single out only certain pro-abort Republicans? Christie Todd Whitless and Tom Ridge have their stances plastered all over TV when they were nominated for their posts. By contrast, "conservative" Gale Norton is just as pro-abortion as Whitman and Ridge, but you'd never know about it, because all the pro-life organizations stayed fairly silent when HER nomination came up. In fact, we were told that she was EXTREMELY conservative merely because all these enviromental wackos opposed her. The truth turned out to be far from that-- in many ways she was even worse than Whitman. At least a liberal Republican like Whitman was forced to give token support to the conservative leaders. Norton never did any such thing, she was a left-leaning Libertarian who merely decided to put an "R" next to her name so she'd have a better shot at winning elections. She never campaigned on behalf on conservative Colorado Republicans. On the contrary, she tried to destroy several of them (see Wayne Allard).
The silence was (and still is) defending. If you're gonna complain about Ridge, it's time we stop pretending Gale Norton is Ms. Social Conservativism.