Politics

New Obama ad attacks Romney for abortion opposition

During the Republican presidential primary, Mitt Romney’s opponents tried to take him down by using his former support for legal abortion as proof that he’s not really pro-life. In the general election, Barack Obama is taking the opposite approach by characterizing the ex-Massachusetts governor as an anti-choice radical.

As usual, when pro-aborts try to push the extremism card, they’ve come up short in the accuracy department. This week, FactCheck.org tore apart an Obama campaign ad claiming that Romney “backed a law that outlaws all abortions, even in cases of rape and incest.”

First, they note that there was no such law under consideration, merely a hypothetical question posed to Romney that didn’t specify any of the so-called hard cases:

A.J. from Millstone, New Jersey, Nov. 28, 2007: If hypothetically Roe versus Wade was overturned, and the Congress passed a federal ban on all abortion, and it came to your desk, would you sign it? Yes or no?

Romney: I agree with Senator (Fred) Thompson, which is we should overturn Roe v. Wade and return these issues to the states. I would welcome a circumstance where there was such a consensus in this country that we said, we don’t want to have abortion in this country at all, period. That would be wonderful. I’d be delighted.

CNN’s Anderson Cooper: The question is: Would you sign that bill?

Romney: Let me say it. I’d be delighted to sign that bill. But that’s not where we are. That’s not where America is today. Where America is is ready to overturn Roe v. Wade and return to the states that authority. But if the Congress got there, we had that kind of consensus in the country, terrific.

Second, FactCheck points out that throughout both of his presidential bids, Romney has consistently specified that he makes exceptions for rape, incest, and to save the mother’s life.

So much for that line of attack; despite what Team Obama wants the country to believe, Romney’s true pro-life platform lines up just fine with mainstream opinion on abortion. However, it raises another question as to whether 100% pro-lifers can accept laws and politicians who make such compromises with abortion.

As a matter of principle, I don’t accept rape or incest as justifications for abortion, and I agree with Josh Brahm’s take on life-of-the-mother cases. I believe that our goal should be full legal protection for all innocent human beings, regardless of what their fathers did, and I believe that every effort should be made to save both patients in dangerous pregnancies. Romney’s more moderate position may be more politically expedient or even rooted in genuine compassion for rape victims, but it’s not morally or logically consistent.

And yet, those exceptions don’t prevent me from supporting laws that contain them, nor do they disqualify politicians who accommodate them, for the same reason that pro-lifers can support laws that ban only sex-selective abortions, or ban only partial-birth abortions, or place only requirements like ultrasound viewing or parental consent on the procedure.

In a democratic society where decisions are ultimately made by over 300 million people of widely differing views and values, principles can’t be implemented with perfect consistency until enough people are convinced to do so. Government can prohibit only as many abortions as the public will allow it to, and with only 20% of Americans in the no-exceptions category, rape and incest exceptions simply won’t be uprooted until after abortion on demand is.

Partial legal protection for the unborn may not be ideal, but it pushes both the law and the culture in the right direction, by dramatically narrowing the range of acceptable justifications for abortion and acclimating the public to think of the unborn more as victims and less as objects. We save as many babies as we can today, and work to convince our fellow citizens to save the rest tomorrow.

What do you think? Where do you believe pro-lifers should draw the line between principled concessions to practical reality and unacceptable compromises of our core principles?

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  • Rebecca Downs

    I know that Romney supports abortion in rape and incest. And I’m in no way affiliated with making sure campaign ads are accurate and the like. I feel if I wrote an article stating something so incorrect, I’d have editors all over correcting me, if not then angry commenters or people just pointing out I was wrong. Why isn’t the Obama administration held to the same standards? Instead it’s one more example in which Obama is lying to the American people. And the American people are going to think that the President most likely knows what he’s talking about.

    Even if you think abortion is the greatest thing in the world or you hate Romney with a fiery passion, I think you should have a problem with this ad. Because it shows Obama will lie about anything he can in order to gain support and take it away from his supporters. Is he the only one to do so, no. But it doesn’t make it right and this is ad is one of the most incorrect in a while.

    • bubbalouwee

      Communist dictators and their regimes do not care about accuracy, they rule by intimidation. They also have a propaganda machine so large segments of the population can have the lies shoved down their throats. Christians and patriotic Americans should be wise enough to seek out information from alternative sources, and NOT get their information from the main stream media.

      • http://twitter.com/Astraspider Astraspider

        I’d suggest you read this piece by a Czechoslovakian who lived under a *real* Communist regime, before you go spouting off fever-dream wing-nuttery.

        http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/11/opinion/obama-the-socialist-not-even-close.html

        In his descriptions of Leninism and Marxism you’ll find all the things you fear about those systems. But they’re not descriptions of America. They’re not even descriptions of socialist democracies like Sweden or Denmark.

        • Rebecca Downs

          We may not be a real Communist regime… yet. I myself do feel for the plights faced by Czechoslovakians in a real and terrible Communist regime. Outside the Supreme Court though on the day the Obamacare decision was announced, I heard immigrants from Eastern European nations express how they came to America because of how different it was from their home Communist nation, but how they feel America is taking a dangerously similar turn.

          Obama certainly wants to take us down a socialist path and even if he didn’t, why does he have the right to lie to the American people about his opponent in hopes of getting elected??

          • http://twitter.com/Astraspider Astraspider

            It’s a pretty lousy socialist who would push us into the private insurance market to pay for private health care. Just sayin’.

  • http://twitter.com/Astraspider Astraspider

    I see where the Obama campaign’s logic is on the point you contest, and it’s pretty thin. Oh, how it would be nice if campaigns didn’t weave crumbs of truth into broad-brush-strokes of propaganda. Like when Romney’s campaign cuts all the context out of an Obama speech to make specious points …

    http://www.factcheck.org/2011/11/romneys-ad-deceitful-dishonest/

    … or when pro-life writers obsess over a couple of ham-fisted proposals in the Illinois Senate and weave it into the implausible idea that then-Senator Obama was in favor of infanticide.

    http://mediamatters.org/research/2008/08/22/myths-and-falsehoods-regarding-obamas-votes-on/144543

    Now, the points you *don’t* contest and that nobody contests (that Romney says he favors the over-turning of Roe and the obliteration of Planned Parenthood) truly make him radical in the eyes of wide swaths of the electorate.

    The question is, do you believe him? I was here in Massachusetts for his 1994 Senate race; I think I preferred that Mitt, when he defended his pro-choice position (that he came to because of polling) by saying: “personal beliefs shouldn’t be imposed on others.”

    http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/the_conversion/2012/02/mitt_romney_s_abortion_record_flip_flop_or_conversion_.single.html

    • http://twitter.com/CalFreiburger Calvin Freiburger

      First, I can’t help but chuckle that you guys keep up with the high-minded fact-checker routine while relying on notoriously fraudulent sources like Media Matters. It really does do significant damage to your credibility in the eyes of those who aren’t fellow travelers. I remember the Obama infanticide debate very well. I investigated all of the Left’s defenses when they made them, and lo and behold, they turned out to be bogus. Here’s my most recent look at the subject: http://liveaction.org/blog/newt-gingrich-reminds-america-that-the-media-covered-for-barack-obamas-babykilling-past/

      Being anti-Roe is only perceived as radical because people don’t understand just how radical it is, and because they aren’t aware of just how indefensible it is as a matter of constitutional law. If the Democratic Party and Planned Parenthood had half the intellectual honesty of many liberal legal scholars (http://washingtonexaminer.com/article/1080661), being anti-Roe would be bipartisan. Similarly, popular ambivalence to defunding Planned Parenthood is mostly a result of propaganda.

      Lastly, I’m well aware of Romney’s record. The first link in this article goes to my own exploration of the subject. There is cause for concern, to be sure, but there’s also more than enough to, on balance, give him the benefit of the doubt.

      • http://twitter.com/Astraspider Astraspider

        Oy vey. Its hard to let go the “you’re link is worse than my link”
        excuse for dodging the facts in the Media Matters piece, especially when
        you prolifically link to sites like Townhall and news sources squarely
        in your own comfort zone (I may disagree with those sites, but I’d never
        declare them “fraudulent”).

        In any event, I know you and pro-life partisans have done extensive
        postmortems on the Illinois votes. But it all ignores the fact that
        Obama really has a tenable position: that it would be an extraneous statute,
        forwarded by pro-life partisans whose reputations for crafting cleanly written law was never above reproach. Trying to make anything else out of it is spinning curlicues of logic — just like the point in this Obama ad that we’re apparently in agreement on.

        As for Roe, I’ve conceded in the past you have a case on it’s novelty (whether it qualifies as “radical” or not is in the eye of the beholder). What’s also in the eye of the beholder (or, as I said above, in “wide swaths of the electorate”) is the idea that the desire to overturn Roe is, indeed, radical. Does Obama not have a right to make a pitch to those people?

        And PP: Really? You’ve really already blotted out the whole Komen blowback? Underestimating PP’s appeal is a consistent Achilles heal around here.

        • http://twitter.com/CalFreiburger Calvin Freiburger

          No, I call out relying on Media Matters because their lack of credibility is well-established. They exist for the sole purpose of tearing down the Right and shilling for the Left regardless of what the truth is.

          Could “your link is worse than mine” grow into an excuse for dodging information? Sure, I’ve seen it happen plenty of times. But I don’t do it. I only discredit outright the most obviously fradulent, like Media Matters and Daily Kos because life is short, Internet debates are rarely productive to begin with, and I gotta draw the line somewhere. (As for my own sources, I link to a wide range of material, all of which I’m satisfied are credible. I don’t sweat the fact that ideologues who are unreachable anyway may shoot the messenger as an excuse to avoid inconvenient information.)

          No, it wouldn’t have been extraneous, since such cases weren’t being prosecuted at the time, and the hospital in question admitted they were happening. And the concern about “cleanly written” legislation wasn’t sincere either, since Obama also opposed legislation that contained the clarifying language he claimed as his basis for opposing the earlier version. (Also, I defy anyone to tell me the guy who signed ObamaCare into law gives the slightest damn about laws being cleanly written.)

          And if everything’s in the eye of the beholder, then I’m not sure what the point of debating it is. It’s not denying public opinion to say that public opinion is based on misconceptions. I’m merely saying I trust that minds can be changed when truth is brought to light.

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