“Another Shift In The Works?”: Mitt Romney’s Latest Conversion On Abortion
Is Mitt Romney shifting his abortion position again?
It’s fairly well-known that Romney proclaimed himself in favor of abortion rights when he ran for office in Massachusetts, then reversed himself before launching his presidential bid. But recently, the GOP nominee seems to be softening his opposition somewhat. Or is he?
Romney proclaimed himself a strong supporter of abortion rights both in 1994, when he ran unsuccessfully for Senate against incumbent Democrat Edward Kennedy, and in 2002, when he defeated Democrat Shannon O’Brien to become governor.
“I will preserve and protect a woman’s right to choose,” he said in a 2002 debate with O’Brien. “And I do take exception to Shannon characterizing my view as being any different than hers in this regard; The Boston Globe recently reported there’s not a paper’s width worth of difference between our two positions in this regard.”
But that changed halfway though Romney’s term as governor. He says his conversion came after he talked to a Harvard scientist about embryonic stem cells. Now, he says his position is to oppose almost all abortions.
“My own view is that I oppose abortion except for cases of rape, incest, and where the life of the mother is threatened,” he told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt Aug. 24.
But that’s slightly different from what he told CBS that same week.
“My position has been clear throughout the campaign,” he said. “I’m in favor of abortion being legal in the case of rape and incest, and health and life of the mother.”
So in that interview, Romney added one more exception — for the woman’s health.
The Romney campaign won’t say the candidate misspoke, but a spokeswoman does say he doesn’t support an exception to protect the health of the pregnant woman. That’s because other abortion opponents, including GOP vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan, insist it creates too large a loophole, since health often encompasses mental health, too.
“The health exception is a loophole wide enough to drive a Mack truck through it,” said Ryan on the House floor during a debate in 2000 on a bill to ban the procedure some call “partial birth” abortion. “The health exception would render this ban virtually meaningless.”
Beth Shipp, political director for the abortion rights group NARAL Pro-Choice America, says she’s stunned by those who oppose exceptions for health reasons.
“They actually think that somehow women make up health problems like diabetes, or kidney failure, or breast cancer,” she said, “or any of the myriad of other health concerns that women in this country face when they become pregnant.”
But even without a health exception, the question remains: Does Romney really support abortions for victims of rape? The question has become more relevant in light of the recent controversy surrounding Missouri Republican Senate candidate Todd Akin. He suggested that victims of “legitimate rape” couldn’t get pregnant, and later apologized.
But for all of Romney’s efforts to try to distance himself from Akin, when he was governor of Massachusetts, Romney vetoed a bill that would have required that rape victims be provided not abortions, but morning-after pills in the emergency room.
“It’s very important to remember that emergency contraception is birth control,” says Shipp of NARAL. “It’s not RU-486, which people refer to as the abortion pill.”
Although some very ardent opponents say the morning-after pill can technically cause a very early abortion by preventing the implantation of a fertilized egg, medical experts insist that’s not how it works. Yet Romney said it could “terminate life after conception” in a Boston Globe column explaining his veto.
The Republican platform calls for protecting life from conception. It doesn’t allow any exceptions, including those for rape, incest or the life of the woman. Shipp says if that’s Romney’s position, then fine. But voters will see through it if he tries to go back and forth.
“They pay attention. They learn about the issues,” she said. “And every time that Mitt Romney tries to reinvent himself, they say, ‘But wait a minute, I remember you said …’ They do their homework; they understand the responsibility that comes with voting for the highest office in the land.”
Last week, Romney’s oldest sister Jane told reporters at the convention that her brother wasn’t going to ban abortion if he becomes president. “It’s not his focus,” she told a National Journal reporter.
But comments like that, clearly aimed at closing the candidate’s sizable gender gap, could come as a rude surprise to social conservatives Romney’s worked hard to woo for the past seven years.
By: Julie Rovner, NPR, September 3, 2012
“Re-defining Presidential Politics”: Voting Women Is Key For Complete Gender Equality
The fight for women’s equality will stand still unless women vote. This election year is especially important as Congress will vote on issues key to women’s economic security and health. Today, on Women’s Equality Day, we all can take a step toward complete gender equality by encouraging our young women to vote on Nov. 6.
Since the height of the women’s rights movement, the percentage of eligible women who vote in presidential elections has declined. According to the Center for American Women and Politics, while 72% of eligible women voted in the 1964 presidential election, only 60% voted in 2008. This apparent complacency among young women with a right that our forebears fought so desperately to earn must be addressed.
Universities and colleges across the country are launching voter initiatives that speak to the young community. TurboVote is an online registration tool that sends email and text message reminders to students with the goal of registering record numbers of students in this presidential election year, a time seeing significantly lower youth enthusiasm than four years ago.
College campuses are a bright spot in the work toward women’s equality. Today, women have surpassed men in pursuit of higher education, graduating in greater numbers and with more degrees than their male counterparts. Another great higher education initiative is Vision 2020, a national campaign launched at Drexel University with the goal of achieving gender equality by 2020, the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote.
When I was a young college instructor, such a goal would have been unimaginable. My department chair told me I would never be granted tenure. Apparently, I had embarrassed my male colleagues by publishing more papers than they had written collectively.
As a president of a Big Ten university and a former U.S. secretary of health and human services, I cannot help but feel proud looking back at overcoming such blatant discrimination. But I also cannot help feeling concerned about the many places in the country still dominated by males – whether it be corporate boardrooms, chambers of commerce or even our nation’s capital. I am proud of the strides we have made as a country, but we have a ways to go.
Women’s equality is a problem not just for women but for all Americans. The best policies are made when there is genuine diversity of thought involved in the process, which includes the distinct voice of women.
Today, as our country celebrates the legacy of those who fought hard for justice, opportunity and prosperity, let us recommit ourselves to the goal of gender equality in our country. And by voting this November, the nation will have no choice but to hear us. Ninety-two years after the passage of the 19th Amendment, we may finally see women redefine presidential politics.
By: Donna Shalala, President, University of Miami, JSOnline, August 24, 2012
“Spewing Horsepucky”: Dear Republicans, Contraception Is An Economic Issue
Republicans on the Sunday talk show circuit spent a lot of time insisting that contraception isn’t a real issue for women voters, that it’s unimportant and will take a back seat to the economy. Colorado Republican Chair Ryan Call said much the same thing on a local Colorado political show Friday night when he insisted access to contraception was a “small issue.”
Horsepucky. There is no more fundamental economic issue for women than determining if and when they will have children. Fertility is destiny. The Pill was the catalyst for the sexual revolution and the full entry of women into the American workforce because, for the first time in history, women could themselves control their own reproduction. Approximately 99 percent of reproductive age American women have used birth control—and something used by almost every woman in America isn’t a small issue, it’s huge.
A March 6, 2012 blog post in the New York Times, “The Economic Impact of the Pill”, summed it up:
Those changes have had enormous impacts on the economy, studies show: increasing the number of women in the labor force, raising the number of hours that women work and giving women access to traditionally male and highly lucrative professions in fields like law and medicine.
A study by Martha J. Bailey, Brad Hershbein and Amalia R. Miller helps assign a dollar value to those tectonic shifts. For instance, they show that young women who won access to the pill in the 1960s ended up earning an 8 percent premium on their hourly wages by age 50.
Such trends have helped narrow the earnings gap between men and women. Indeed, the paper suggests that the pill accounted for 30 percent—30 percent!—of the convergence of men’s and women’s earnings from 1990 to 2000.
Republicans have also argued that when it comes to reproductive healthcare, affordability and access are two separate issues. Right, and I suppose Dick Cheney paid for his six-figure heart transplant by washing dishes in the hospital commissary. Furthermore, pregnancy prevention programs, including subsidized contraception, save taxpayers money—anywhere from $2 to $6 for every $1 spent, according to a study by a Brookings Institution scholar.
Republican strategist Alex Castellanos, a repeat winner for the Mad Men Chauvinist of the Week Award, undermined his own spin on Meet the Press when he falsely stated that women don’t earn less than men do. Some single women without children are able to close the income gap in some metropolitan areas for precisely that reason—they don’t have kids, and can replicate men’s hours at the office. Women with children often fall behind economically because they’re working a double-shift, at home and at work, and our child care system in this country is wildly inadequate.
Contraception isn’t just a big issue to women voters, it’s obviously a big issue to Republicans, despite their protest to the contrary now that it’s costing them with women voters. It’s big enough that they threatened to shut down the entire U.S. government over it last spring. It’s big enough that Republican governors like Mitch Daniels have made defunding Planned Parenthood a top priority, as has their presidential candidate Mitt Romney. Romney even wants to eliminate federal funding for Title X, which provides family planning funding for five million low-income Americans.
Which begs the question: If contraception is key to women’s economics, why are Republicans trying to keep women from getting it?
By: Laura Chapin, U. S. News and World Report, April 30, 2012
“Mitt’s Other World”: Mothers Should Be Required To Work Outside Home Or Lose Benefits
Poor women who stay at home to raise their children should be given federal assistance for child care so that they can enter the job market and “have the dignity of work,” Mitt Romney said in January, undercutting the sense of extreme umbrage he showed when Democratic strategist Hilary Rosen quipped last week that Ann Romney had not “worked a day in her life.”
The remark, made to a Manchester, N.H., audience, was unearthed by MSNBC’s “Up w/Chris Hayes,” and aired during the 8 a.m. hour of his show Sunday.
Ann Romney and her husband’s campaign fired back hard at Rosen following her remark. “I made a choice to stay home and raise five boys. Believe me, it was hard work,” Romney said on Twitter.
Mitt Romney, however, judging by his January remark, views stay-at-home moms who are supported by federal assistance much differently than those backed by hundreds of millions in private equity income. Poor women, he said, shouldn’t be given a choice, but instead should be required to work outside the home to receive Temporary Assistance for Needy Families benefits. “[E]ven if you have a child 2 years of age, you need to go to work,” Romney said of moms on TANF.
Recalling his effort as governor to increase the amount of time women on welfare in Massachusetts were required to work, Romney noted that some had considered his proposal “heartless,” but he argued that the women would be better off having “the dignity of work” — a suggestion Ann Romney would likely take issue with.
“I wanted to increase the work requirement,” said Romney. “I said, for instance, that even if you have a child 2 years of age, you need to go to work. And people said, ‘Well that’s heartless.’ And I said, ‘No, no, I’m willing to spend more giving day care to allow those parents to go back to work. It’ll cost the state more providing that daycare, but I want the individuals to have the dignity of work.'”
Regardless of its level of dignity, for Ann Romney, her work raising her children would not have fulfilled her work requirement had she been on TANF benefits. As HuffPost reported Thursday:
As far as Uncle Sam is concerned, if you’re poor, deciding to stay at home and rear your children is not an option. Thanks to welfare reform, recipients of federal benefits must prove to a caseworker that they have performed, over the course of a week, a certain number of hours of “work activity.” That number changes from state to state, and each state has discretion as to how narrowly work is defined, but federal law lists 12 broad categories that are covered.
Raising children is not among them.
According to a 2006 Congressional Research Service report, the dozen activities that fulfill the work requirement are:
(1) unsubsidized employment
(2) subsidized private sector employment
(3) subsidized public sector employment
(4) work experience
(5) on-the-job training
(6) job search and job readiness assistance
(7) community services programs
(8) vocational educational training
(9) job skills training directly related to employment
(10) education directly related to employment (for those without a high school degree or equivalent)
(11) satisfactory attendance at a secondary school
(12) provision of child care to a participant of a community service programThe only child-care related activity on the list is the last one, which would allow someone to care for someone else’s child if that person were off volunteering. But it does not apply to married couples in some states. Connecticut, for instance, specifically prevents counting as “work” an instance in which one parent watches a child while the other parent volunteers.
The federal government does at least implicitly acknowledge the value of child care, though not for married couples. According to a 2012 Urban Institute study, a single mother is required to work 30 hours a week, but the requirement drops to 20 hours if she has a child under 6. A married woman, such as Romney, would not be entitled to such a reduction in the requirement. If a married couple receives federally funded child care, the work requirement increases by 20 hours, from 35 hours to 55 hours between the two of them, another implicit acknowledgment of the value of stay-at-home work.
Romney’s January view echoes a remark he made in 1994 during his failed Senate campaign. “This is a different world than it was in the 1960s when I was growing up, when you used to have Mom at home and Dad at work,” Romney said, as shown in a video posted by BuzzFeed’s Andrew Kaczynski. “Now Mom and Dad both have to work whether they want to or not, and usually one of them has two jobs.”
BY: Ryan Grim, The Huffington Post, April 15, 2012
“An Unrepresentative Woman”: Typical Stay-At-Home Mom Bears No Resemblance To Ann Romney
You’d have to be a monster to deny that Ann Romney has had a rough time of it these last few years. Breast cancer and multiple sclerosis? We should obviously sympathize and send her well wishes. But nothing about that should prevent us from also looking honestly at her background and asking how representative a symbol of twenty-first century American womanhood she is. Liberals shouldn’t sneer at the fact that she never held a job outside the home (if only Hilary Rosen had phrased it in the clinical, social science-y way I just did, this “controversy” probably never would have erupted!). But conservatives have no business pretending that she represents anything beyond what she in fact is, which is a woman who was born to fantastic privilege and who married into even more fantastic privilege, and who simply hasn’t had to make the hard choices that many women have to make. She turns out not even to represent stay-at-home moms very well at all, and if Republicans think this little fracas is rallying stay-at-home moms to their reactionary cause, they’re deluding themselves.
First, a bit about Ann nee Davies. She grew up in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, one of American’s wealthiest suburbs. She attended the posh private sister school of the posh private school her future husband attended. Her father was the president of a company that made maritime machinery. While still in college, she married the son of an ex-automobile company CEO. The couple would have to make its own way in the early years, as young couples do, but surely they knew that if a serious crisis hit them, they’d have someone to turn to. They’d never end up on the street or on a relative’s Castro convertible.
I’m plenty aware that I am going to be accused in the comment thread of class envy, but I’m just laying out facts. They shouldn’t be held against her: For all I know Ann Romney is the most generous, empathetic, and self-abnegating woman in the United States. But it’s simply a fact that she’s never had to worry about how she was going to feed her kids, or what she might do if tragedy befell. And lo and behold, tragedy, or something very close to it, did befall. She received two devastating diagnoses. She undoubtedly had excellent insurance coverage and undoubtedly received the best possible care. And since conservatives are so obsessed with pillorying the people they think of as the undeserving in society, I say it’s not unreasonable of me to point that out she “earned” her excellent insurance and care by marrying well.
But what of the millions of women who share her bad luck health-wise but don’t share her good luck wealth-wise? We don’t know what she thinks, and maybe since she’s not the candidate she is under no obligation to tell us, interesting as it might be to find out. But we do know what her husband, her own presumed insurance provider, thinks. He thinks the hell with them. He used to care about them, when he passed a law giving them a fair shot at buying affordable coverage, but now he wants to repeal the law that does the same thing nationally, and the only reason is political calculation and cowardice. That’s his, not hers. But I do wonder whether she agrees with him that these women should be left on their own because to help them would be to hand a political victory to the enemy.
The interesting thing about all this is that your “typical,” if there is such a thing, stay-at-home mom bears not the remotest resemblance to Ann Romney. The Census Bureau studied this question for the first time (?!) in 2007, and the results were, to me, totally surprising and fascinating. Stay-at-home mothers, you probably think, are more likely to be white, well-off, proper, all-around June Cleaver-ish. Uh, June Cleaver was around 50 years ago and lived on TV. In today’s actual America, stay-at-home moms are more likely to be: younger; Hispanic (Latina, if you prefer); foreign-born; less well educated. About one-quarter of married mothers of children under 15 didn’t work outside the home, the bureau found; and fully 19 percent of that one-quarter had less than a high-school degree, while that was true of just 8 percent of working mothers. This suggests pretty clearly that a significant number of women who stay at home don’t do so by choice, but because they don’t have marketable skills—or because they can’t get jobs that pay enough to cover the cost of childcare.
The study found 5.6 million stay-at-home moms in all. The above numbers suggest that maybe half of them or thereabouts are there by total choice—have decided to stay home and raise multiple children. The rest are probably there because of crappy educations—their fault in some cases, no doubt, the system’s in others. Whichever the case, these women are not staying home by “choice,” and they tend to be the women society really forgets about and pays no attention to. I doubt pretty strongly that they identify much with Ann Romney or are rallying to her husband’s cause.
This whole fracas happened simply because conservatives saw an opportunity to accuse liberals of being elitist. There was a whiff of that in Rosen’s wording, but at least Rosen is affiliated with the side in American politics that wants women who didn’t grow up in Bloomfield Hills and marry well to have a chance to receive excellent health care if they ever find themselves in Ann Romney’s position.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, April 14, 2012
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