Reassessing Sexual Politics - Stop asking Romney and the other Republican front runners about abortion and ask them where they stand on contraception
Reassessing Sexual Politics - Stop asking Romney and the other Republican front runners about abortion and start asking them where they stand on family planning.
By Eleanor Clift
© 2007 Newsweek, Inc.
Updated: 2:00 p.m. CT Aug 17, 2007
Aug. 17, 2007 - Asked to identify a defining mistake in his life, Mitt Romney said it was taking a pro-choice position when he was personally pro-life. “That was wrong,” he declared in a Republican candidates’ debate. This week, Romney got caught investing in two companies that do embryonic stem-cell research, which he opposes. He promised to yank the investments, explaining they’re in a blind trust and he wasn’t aware of the conflict with his values until it was reported in the Boston Herald.
Romney is campaigning on a theme of “change,” and no one has changed as much as he has. He’s remade himself to the point where it’s hard to find a legitimate evolutionary thread in anything he says. A lot of broadcast time and column inches have been expended on probing exactly when and how Romney established his pro-life bona fides. But the journey is pretty straightforward, even if Romney isn’t: he never would have been elected governor of Massachusetts if he ran as pro-life. He won’t get the Republican nomination if he doesn’t toe the line on Republican orthodoxy when it comes to reproductive rights (especially as a Mormon whom many voters already find suspect).
There are more debates ahead, and it’s useless to keep berating Romney about his conversion from pro-choice to pro-life. We know where he and the other Republican candidates stand on abortion. With the exception of Rudy Giuliani, they want Roe v. Wade overturned. They’ve gone further than George W. Bush did in 2000, when he said, as a candidate, that the climate didn’t exist for overturning Roe, that you have to win hearts and minds first. A more useful line of questioning would be to ask where Romney and the other Republicans stand on family planning and birth control.
Next week is the one-year anniversary of the FDA decision to approve the emergency contraception pill Plan B for over-the-counter sales. Approval was delayed for three years because of pressure from social conservatives and the ideological pandering to the right that underlies much of the Bush administration’s policies on health and science. Now that Plan B is available, that should be the end of the controversy. But the cultural war goes on with some large corporations, such as Wal-Mart and Kroger, slow to stock the morning-after pill, and numerous reports of pharmacists refusing to offer it, especially in hard-to-access rural areas.
Family planning is an issue Republicans generally like to avoid because it threatens the coalition between economic conservatives and the religious right. Business types tend to be live-and-let-live, while a segment of social conservatives oppose birth control with almost the same fervor they oppose abortion. Family planning is such an under-the-radar issue for Republicans that Nancy Keenan, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, says the Right to Life organization doesn’t advertise a birth-control position. “But you find in that movement—and they’ve become much more assertive about it—if you use birth control, you are stopping a life and that’s not acceptable,” she says. Listen to right-wing talk radio and you’ll hear how making birth control available or teaching sex-ed in public schools leads to sex. That's an argument equivalent to believing that putting air bags in cars causes accidents, says Instead of hammering away at the candidates about abortion, Keenan suggests a set of questions far more revealing: do you think it’s OK for a pharmacy to refuse to fill a woman’s prescription for birth-control pills based on the personal views of the pharmacist? Should hospital emergency rooms be allowed to withhold information from a rape victim about the morning-after pill, which can prevent a pregnancy if it’s taken soon enough after the assault? Do you support age-appropriate sex education (with “age-appropriate” the key phrase as to when it’s time to shelve the stork)?
We can glean some answers from the public record. Romney vetoed a bill in 2005 that would have let pharmacists dispense information about—and access to—emergency contraception without a prescription for sexual-assault survivors. The FDA’s decision a year later to allow the morning-after pill to be sold over-the- counter made Romney’s veto moot, but it offers a window into his thinking. Everybody is awaiting the heralded entry of “Law & Order” actor Fred Thompson into the race. He’ll have to defend lobbying for a pro-choice group, but he should also be asked about his Senate vote to cut $75 million from the maternal- and child-health bloc grant. (He wanted to fund a new abstinence program.) John McCain voted against Title 10 family-planning programs, which provide low-income women access to birth control. How far will the candidates take public policy to pander to Republican primary voters? Romney has taken flip-flopping to an existential level, but he’s not the only one who sees merit in confusing the voters.
By Eleanor Clift
© 2007 Newsweek, Inc.
Updated: 2:00 p.m. CT Aug 17, 2007
Aug. 17, 2007 - Asked to identify a defining mistake in his life, Mitt Romney said it was taking a pro-choice position when he was personally pro-life. “That was wrong,” he declared in a Republican candidates’ debate. This week, Romney got caught investing in two companies that do embryonic stem-cell research, which he opposes. He promised to yank the investments, explaining they’re in a blind trust and he wasn’t aware of the conflict with his values until it was reported in the Boston Herald.
Romney is campaigning on a theme of “change,” and no one has changed as much as he has. He’s remade himself to the point where it’s hard to find a legitimate evolutionary thread in anything he says. A lot of broadcast time and column inches have been expended on probing exactly when and how Romney established his pro-life bona fides. But the journey is pretty straightforward, even if Romney isn’t: he never would have been elected governor of Massachusetts if he ran as pro-life. He won’t get the Republican nomination if he doesn’t toe the line on Republican orthodoxy when it comes to reproductive rights (especially as a Mormon whom many voters already find suspect).
There are more debates ahead, and it’s useless to keep berating Romney about his conversion from pro-choice to pro-life. We know where he and the other Republican candidates stand on abortion. With the exception of Rudy Giuliani, they want Roe v. Wade overturned. They’ve gone further than George W. Bush did in 2000, when he said, as a candidate, that the climate didn’t exist for overturning Roe, that you have to win hearts and minds first. A more useful line of questioning would be to ask where Romney and the other Republicans stand on family planning and birth control.
Next week is the one-year anniversary of the FDA decision to approve the emergency contraception pill Plan B for over-the-counter sales. Approval was delayed for three years because of pressure from social conservatives and the ideological pandering to the right that underlies much of the Bush administration’s policies on health and science. Now that Plan B is available, that should be the end of the controversy. But the cultural war goes on with some large corporations, such as Wal-Mart and Kroger, slow to stock the morning-after pill, and numerous reports of pharmacists refusing to offer it, especially in hard-to-access rural areas.
Family planning is an issue Republicans generally like to avoid because it threatens the coalition between economic conservatives and the religious right. Business types tend to be live-and-let-live, while a segment of social conservatives oppose birth control with almost the same fervor they oppose abortion. Family planning is such an under-the-radar issue for Republicans that Nancy Keenan, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, says the Right to Life organization doesn’t advertise a birth-control position. “But you find in that movement—and they’ve become much more assertive about it—if you use birth control, you are stopping a life and that’s not acceptable,” she says. Listen to right-wing talk radio and you’ll hear how making birth control available or teaching sex-ed in public schools leads to sex. That's an argument equivalent to believing that putting air bags in cars causes accidents, says Instead of hammering away at the candidates about abortion, Keenan suggests a set of questions far more revealing: do you think it’s OK for a pharmacy to refuse to fill a woman’s prescription for birth-control pills based on the personal views of the pharmacist? Should hospital emergency rooms be allowed to withhold information from a rape victim about the morning-after pill, which can prevent a pregnancy if it’s taken soon enough after the assault? Do you support age-appropriate sex education (with “age-appropriate” the key phrase as to when it’s time to shelve the stork)?
We can glean some answers from the public record. Romney vetoed a bill in 2005 that would have let pharmacists dispense information about—and access to—emergency contraception without a prescription for sexual-assault survivors. The FDA’s decision a year later to allow the morning-after pill to be sold over-the- counter made Romney’s veto moot, but it offers a window into his thinking. Everybody is awaiting the heralded entry of “Law & Order” actor Fred Thompson into the race. He’ll have to defend lobbying for a pro-choice group, but he should also be asked about his Senate vote to cut $75 million from the maternal- and child-health bloc grant. (He wanted to fund a new abstinence program.) John McCain voted against Title 10 family-planning programs, which provide low-income women access to birth control. How far will the candidates take public policy to pander to Republican primary voters? Romney has taken flip-flopping to an existential level, but he’s not the only one who sees merit in confusing the voters.
posted by Carlos T Mock at 6:16 AM
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