Ron Paul Vs. Birth Control: So Much For The Right To Privacy
Last year, Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul introduced a bill in Congress that would allow states to ban contraception if they choose.
Paul’s “We the People Act,” which he introduced in 2004, 2005, 2009, and 2011, explicitly forbids federal courts and the Supreme Court of the United States from ruling on the constitutionality of a variety of state and local laws. That includes, among other things, “any claim based upon the right of privacy, including any such claim related to any issue of sexual practices, orientation, or reproduction.” The bill would let states write laws forbidding abortion, the use of contraceptives, or consensual gay sex, for example.
If passed, Paul’s bill could undermine the most important Supreme Court case dealing with contraception—1965’s Griswold v. Connecticut. In that case, the high court found that a Connecticut law prohibiting the use of contraception was unconstitutional based on a “right to marital privacy” afforded by the Bill of Rights. In other words, the court declared that states cannot interfere with what happens between the sheets when it comes to reproduction.
Paul’s bill would also keep the federal courts out of cases like Roe v. Wade and 2003’s Lawrence v. Texas, in which the justices found that privacy is a guaranteed right concerning sexual practices and struck down Texas’ anti-sodomy law as unconstitutional.
It’s well known that Paul, like the other remaining GOP presidential contenders, is no fan of abortion or gay people. But the issue of contraception access is one that has not received nearly as much attention.
Paul’s bill hasn’t received much support in the House. It has no cosponsors and has never made it to a vote on the House floor. But that’s not its biggest potential problem: “I don’t think it would be constitutional to strip the court of that power,” said Bebe Anderson, director of the US legal program as the Center for Reproductive Rights. “You certainly couldn’t do it by law—you’d have to amend the constitution to do that.”
Paul’s campaign did not respond to a request for a clarification on the intent of the his proposed law with regard to contraception. But as Addie Stan notes over at Alternet, Paul’s response to a question about the Griswold ruling during a January presidential debate provides hints about what he might say. “As far as selling contraceptives, the Interstate Commerce Clause protects this because the Interstate Commerce Clause was originally written not to impede trade between the states, but it was written to facilitate trade between the states,” Paul said. “So if it’s not illegal to import birth control pills from one state to the next, it would be legal to sell birth control pills in that state.”
Paul is saying, in short, that his bill wouldn’t actually ban the sale of contraceptives, which would be protected under the Commerce Clause of the Constitution. But that’s an extremely unorthodox interpretation of the Commerce Clause, according to several lawyers Mother Jones contacted. The clause typically only deals with whether or not Congress has the ability to regulate interstate business. Paul is correct that the Commerce Clause would prevent a state from banning the importation of birth control pills from another state. But absent a constitutional right to privacy, states could still bar their citizens from buying or selling birth control within the state. “The right to access contraception has not been based on the Commerce Clause in my understanding,” explains the Center for Reproductive Rights’ Anderson.
Among the other GOP candidates who have weighed in on Griswold, Rick Santorum has said he thinks the Supreme Court made the wrong decision. Mitt Romney, meanwhile, square danced (as usual) around the question at the same January debate, first asserting that he “would totally and completely oppose any effort to ban contraception” before waffling on the question of whether states should be able to enact their own bans. “I don’t know whether a state has a right to ban contraception,” he said. “No state wants to…and asking me whether they could do it or not is kind of a silly thing, I think.”
Romney is wrong to suggest no state would contemplate banning contraception. Mississippi considered a ballot measure last November that would likely have done just that. And if Paul has his way, no court would be able to strike down such a law.
By: Kate Sheppard, Mother Jones, February 14, 2012
What’s A Republican Feminist To Do?
In the winter line-up of Republican presidential candidates, a moderate pro-choice Republican woman has no choice. She might feel as if she were so, well, last century.
It is not news that the Republican Party has moved further right on social issues over the past few decades, but the 2012 campaign is a clear marker showing that the party has left legal abortion behind. All the contenders, past and present, adamantly oppose legal abortion, even the libertarian obstetrician-gynecologist, Ron Paul. Overturning legal abortion may in fact be the one thing they all agree on — so it doesn’t come up much in debates, speeches or interviews. But it is on their agenda.
The one woman in the race, Michele Bachmann, made her anti-abortion views known more strongly than most before dropping out after the Iowa caucuses. At a debate in December, she chastised Gingrich for missing a chance to “defund” Planned Parenthood when he was speaker of the House. Then Bachmann pressed Gingrich harder still for supporting House candidates who favor keeping late-term abortions legal: “He said he would support and campaign for Republicans that support the barbaric practice of ‘partial birth’ abortion,” Bachmann said. “I would never do that.”
Early on, at summer forums before a vote was cast, Rick Santorum staked out the most extreme ground: requiring women and girls who are victims of rape or incest to carry a pregnancy to term. “To put them through another trauma of an abortion, I think is too much to ask,” he declared at an Iowa presidential debate. “One violence is enough.” In June, Santorum told David Gregory on Meet the Press that doctors who performed abortions in cases of rape or incest should be criminally charged.
For two generations of American women, Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision, defined abortion as a private individual decision. Broadly speaking, polls show the American public lives with this framework and is not looking for a fight to tear it down. But a recent Pew Research Center poll shows that the question is a close call, with 54% of the public supporting legal abortion in most or all cases and 42% of the public opposed to legal abortion in most or all cases. The numbers show that the argument over abortion remains divisive, but also that there is an uneasy equilibrium.
Even Jon Huntsman, supposedly the Republican who was most appealing to Democrats, signed a law when he was governor of Utah to outlaw most abortions if Roe v. Wade were overturned. Running for president, he liked to say that two of his daughters were adopted and that he was grateful to their mothers for bearing them. Lest he seem soft next to the rest, Huntsman reminded voters of the “trigger” law: “I signed the bill that would trigger the ban on abortion in Utah if Roe v. Wade were overturned.”
Mitt Romney, the winner in Florida and now the clear front-runner, was pro-choice when he ran against the late Senator Edward M. Kennedy in 1994, although Romney was personally against abortion. During a debate with Romney, Kennedy remarked, “I am pro-choice. My opponent is multiple-choice.” During the same debate, Romney said, “I believe that abortion should be safe and legal. I have since the time that my mom took that position when she ran in 1970 as a U.S Senate candidate.”
Romney also spoke with sorrow about a death in the family from an illegal abortion. By 2002, however, when he ran for governor of Massachusetts, he presented himself as a “pro-life” politician who would not change the pro-choice laws of the liberal state he would govern. In the last decade, Romney has become more outspoken in his opposition to abortion, though as a “pro-life president” he says he’d make exceptions for rape, incest and when the life of the mother is at stake.
Romney likes to brag about how many years he has been married (42), in a not-so-subtle dig at the thrice-wed Newt Gingrich. The race’s most mercurial candidate, Gingrich never presented himself as a feminist, far from it. In private, his messy divorces do not hold up well to scrutiny from any direction. Women voters in Florida substantially favored Romney. Gingrich’s opposition to abortion rights, always solid, became more aggressive over the course of the campaign. To the surprise of some, he took a “personhood” movement pledge to oppose abortion, with no exceptions.
More significant in shaping the Republican stance toward women was Gingrich’s Contract with America, which lifted him to the perch of House Speaker in 1995. The Contract with America cut women out of the picture of Republican policy and rhetoric. As it turns out, the contract was a harbinger of a wave in Republican politics that is regathering its strength this winter.
On the Republican campaign trail, all candidates ever talk about when they talk about women is abortion – and to some extent, marriage and motherhood. That reduces Republican women primary voters down to a simple equation. This silence — or absence of political dialogue — on women takes a while to notice, but it is plainly there. With abortion a hot topic that Republicans prefer to avoid in front of large national audiences, women seem scarce and even invisible. Yet they are a majority of the American electorate.
Early in the campaign, workplace issues like sexual harassment flickered only when allegations of improper sexual conduct toward women colleagues caused Herman Cain’s downfall.
By contrast, whatever he did in his personal life, President Clinton brought a sound grasp of women’s lives to the stump and to the Oval Office. The first bill he signed into law, the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993, was a huge gift to working women. President Obama signed the pay equity act named for Lilly Ledbetter. His affordable health care act would make birth control more freely available.
Republicanism has not always been this way, even recently. Constance Morella, a popular Republican pro-choice congresswoman from Maryland, represented a liberal district, but was defeated in 2002 by a Democrat, Chris Van Hollen. There are not many more like her on the House side.
Margaret Chase Smith, a senator from Maine, the grand old dame of the Republican party, wore a rose every day, including on the first of June in 1950 when she gave the brave, brilliant “Declaration of Conscience” speech she is best know for, denouncing her fellow Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy. Beforehand, she saw McCarthy on the Senate trolley car, looked him in the eye, and told him he would not like what he was about to hear. Smith ran for president in 1964; she lost her seat in the senate in 1972, after serving four terms.
What would she say about Sarah Palin or Michele Bachmann — the two leading Republican women during the campaigns of 2008 and 2012 — and their brand of Christian right politics?
Senator Smith’s memory in the Capitol building lingers. She gave New England Republican women a proud name. To this day, Maine’s senators are both Republican pro-choice women, Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins.
Out of five Republican women in the Senate, Snowe and Collins may be the last of the moderates. Seen as period pieces from a lost Republicanism, they are vulnerable to challenges from their right. Snowe, up for re-election this fall, is a target of the Tea Party movement. If she loses, Republican women will have even less choice.
By: Jamie Stiehm, The New York Times, February 2, 2012
“The Real Romney”: Mitt Misled Voters On His Mom’s Abortion Stance
The new biography “The Real Romney” provides evidence that Mitt Romney has repeatedly mischaracterized his mother’s position on abortion rights. A previously unreported Lenore Romney quote in the book sheds light on Mitt Romney’s convoluted and changing position on the issue, as well as his family’s.
Both Steve Kornacki and I have delved deep into the Romney’s evolution on the issue, including the story of a young relative of Romney who died during an illegal abortion, which Romney once cited as a reason for his being pro-choice. His flip-flop on abortion rights continues to be a political problem, with Newt Gingrich currently running ads attacking Romney for having been a “pro-abortion” governor of Massachusetts.
Before we get to the previously unreported quote from Romney’s mother, here’s the context. Back when Romney was running for Senate as a pro-choice challenger to Ted Kennedy in 1994, he invoked his mother’s position on the issue in a debate.
“I believe that abortion should be safe and legal in this country; I have since the time that my mom took that position when she ran in 1970 as a U.S. Senate candidate,” Romney said, adding:
“I have my own beliefs, and those beliefs are very dear to me. One of them is that I do not impose my beliefs on other people. Many, many years ago, I had a dear, close family relative that was very close to me who passed away from an illegal abortion. It is since that time that my mother and my family have been committed to the belief that we can believe as we want, but we will not force our beliefs on others on that matter. And you will not see me wavering on that.” (Emphasis added.)
Romney again invoked his mother’s “bold and courageous” position in a 2002 Massachusetts gubernatorial debate in which he said he was strongly in favor of preserving a woman’s right to choose.
“My position has been the same throughout my political career, and it goes back to the days of 1970,” he said. “There was a woman who was running for political office, U.S. Senate. She took a very bold and courageous stand in 1970, and that was in a conservative state. That was that a woman should have the right to make her own choice as to whether or not to have an abortion. Her name was Lenore Romney, she was my mom. Even though she lost, she established a record of courage in that regard.”
Romney’s claims about his mother later came under scrutiny when a Boston Globe columnist in 2005 interviewed people who were in the orbit of Lenore Romney’s 1970 Michigan Senate bid who had no memory of her being pro-choice. In response, Mitt Romney’s office dug up a campaign document from his mother’s campaign which stated:
“I support and recognize the need for more liberal abortion rights while reaffirming the legal and medical measures needed to protect the unborn and pregnant woman [sic].”
This was a few years before Roe v. Wade was decided, so that may well have been a progressive stance for the time. But, with its reference to protecting “the unborn,” it hardly seemed like a clear statement of support for legal abortion.
This is where the previously unreported Lenore Romney quote comes in. “The Real Romney” authors Michael Kranish and Scott Helman found a May 1970 story from a Owosso, Michigan, newspaper in which Lenore Romney says of the abortion issue:
“I think we need to reevaluate this, but do not feel it is simple as having an appendectomy. … I’m so tired of hearing the argument that a woman should have the final word on what happens to her own body. This is a life.”
If anything that statement — with its emphasis on women not having the final word — would most accurately be characterized as anti-choice. The irony is that Mitt Romney is now arguably closer to his mother’s actual 1970 position than he was when he ran as a pro-choice Senate candidate in 1994.
By: Justine Elliott, Salon, January 12, 2012
Mitt Romney Switched ’94 Abortion Stance Based On Polling Results
Mitt “Groucho” Romney: “These are my principles. And if you don’t like them, I have others.”
When he challenged Ted Kennedy in the 1994 U.S. Senate race, Mitt Romney used polling data to determine that he would run as a pro-choice candidate while remaining personally pro-life, according to a new book by Boston journalist Ronald Scott.The Washington Examiner revealed the moment in Scott’s book:
According to Scott, Romney revealed that polling from Richard Wirthlin, Ronald Reagan’s former pollster whom Romney had hired for the ’94 campaign, showed it would be impossible for a pro-life candidate to win statewide office in Massachusetts. In light of that, Romney decided to run as a pro-choice candidate, pledging to support Roe v. Wade, while remaining personally pro-life.
Well, that’s certainly pragmatic. If your positions will keep you from getting elected, change your positions. Now he’s trying to win the primaries, so Mitt’s switched his abortion stance back to his original anti-abortion position (or an even more draconian one, I can’t keep up) and no doubt during the general election he’ll find yet another position to take.
As much as we might scorn Romney for changing his past position purely based on polling numbers, I think I might find this even more shallow, though:
In an October 1994 debate, Romney said he believed that abortion should be “safe and legal” and that Roe v. Wade should stand. He added, “And my personal beliefs, like the personal beliefs of other people, should not be brought into a political campaign.”Sen. Kennedy seized on his stance: “On the question of the choice issue, I have supported the Roe v. Wade. I am pro-choice. My opponent is multiple choice.”
Romney responded, “I have my own beliefs and those beliefs are very dear to me. One of them is that I do not impose my beliefs on other people.” He then told the story of a family friend who passed away from an illegal abortion.
So at least back then, his justification for changing his position is that he would not impose his beliefs on other people (bringing a family relative into it as an example). Now he’ll “impose his beliefs” on you happily, I guess, because the Republican base wants him to.
This is what I find so detestable about Romney. Not any individual positions, or even the more atrocious elements of his corporate past, but his apparent lack of any strong principles whatsoever. Every stance is “whatever it has to be,” and tomorrow it might be something else. Both his corporate and his electoral lives have demonstrated a complete lack of personal conviction or morality. Just ambition.
By: Hunter, Daily Kos, December 30, 2011
“Personhood”: Romney Tries To Have It Both Ways
Trying to figure out where Mitt Romney stands on the issues can be difficult. Climate change, gun control, gay rights—the waffling is so bad, there are multiple websites devoted to it.
Now, with a number of states trying to pass laws that would redefine fertilized human eggs as people, Romney has been asked multiple times whether he thinks legal personhood should begin the moment a sperm penetrates an egg. He hasn’t been consistent on the subject.
In 2007, Romney told ABC News he supported a “Human Life Amendment” to the Constitution that would “make it clear that the 14th Amendment’s protections”—equal protection under the law, for example—”apply to unborn children.” The proposed amendment, long a part of the Republican Party platform, is the national equivalent of the state-level personhood measures that have proliferated in recent months. Both the state and federal versions of the proposals would extend legal rights to early term fetuses, effectively making all abortions illegal. Voters in Mississippi considered, and rejected, a ballot initiative on the matter on November 8, but activists recently launched similar efforts in Wisconsin and Georgia.
Supporting such a radical restriction on abortion rights represents a shift for Romney. As a Senate candidate in 1994, he declared, “I believe that abortion should be safe and legal in this country,” and he continued to voice support for Roe v. Wade as governor of Massachusetts. These days, though, Romney says he is “pro-life” and that abortion should be “limited to only instances of rape, incest, or to save the life of the mother.” But the Human Life Amendment he has supported would go much further.
For years, social conservatives have tried and failed to get the two-thirds majority necessary to pass a Human Life Amendment in Congress. Rather than overturning Roe and sending the abortion debate back to the states, the majority of these measures have redefined personhood as beginning at conception—thus extending legal and constitutional rights to fertilized eggs.
The most recent effort on this front is HR 212, Rep. Paul Broun’s (R-Ga.) “Sanctity of Human Life Act.” As Mother Jones’ Nick Baumann has reported, the language of Broun’s bill is nearly identical to Mississippi’s recently defeated personhood amendment, granting “all the legal and constitutional attributes and privileges of personhood” at the point of fertilization. Like the Mississippi amendment, the federal measure would not only outlaw all abortions, but it could also make some types of birth control, in vitro fertilization, and medical interventions for a pregnant woman’s health illegal.
Despite publicly supporting this type of measure in the past, Romney is still trying to play both sides of the issue. In a September debate, Romney was asked explicitly whether he would support a Human Life Amendment. He said he believes that the Supreme Court should return the decision on abortion to the states and promised he would appoint judges who would do just that. As to whether Congress should act to draft a constitutional amendment that includes the unborn, he argued:
That would create obviously a constitutional crisis. Could that happen in this country? Could there be circumstances where that might occur? I think it’s reasonable that something of that nature might happen someday. That’s not something I would precipitate.
The fight over personhood grew much more heated in the weeks following the September debate, and Romney’s position shifted yet again. Asked about personhood during an October television appearance, Romney said that if he had been presented a bill that defined life as beginning at conception while governor of Massachusetts, he “absolutely” would have signed it. He has also made clear that he believes life begins at conception.
As Jason Salzman points out on his blog for the Rocky Mountain Media Watch, Romney has flip-flopped repeatedly on this subject. So does Romney support a federal law that defines “personhood” as beginning at conception, or not?
Romney’s team has tried to finesse the issue, arguing that although he endorses a federal Human Life Amendment, he also thinks that that abortion should be a state-level decision.
That’s not a coherent argument. In order to amend the Constitution, two-thirds of Congress and three-quarters of the states must approve the change. That’s a high bar. But after an amendment passes, the states can’t pick and choose which parts of the Constitution they like. If the Constitution were amended to say a fertilized egg is a legal person, state law would have to be brought in line with the new constitutional reality. It would be as if every state had passed the Mississippi personhood amendment.
“Anywhere they give legal rights to and define ‘person’ as beginning at fertilization, you have the ‘personhood’ effect,” explains Alexa Kolbi-Molinas, a staff attorney at the ACLU’s Reproductive Freedom Project.
Such a change would not simply be a reversal of Roe. “If there’s a Human Life Amendment that gives unborn children the rights of people under the 14th Amendment, then it wouldn’t go back to the states,” says Suzanne Novack, a senior staff attorney at the Center for Reproductive Rights. “It would be the law of the land.”
Romney’s flip-flops on personhood don’t help him politically. But they do fit in with the broader goals of personhood advocates. The movement’s measures aren’t likely to pass, and if they did, they would inevitably be challenged in court. But although personhood measures have failed everywhere they’ve been tried so far, the sustained effort has managed to put the issue on the national stage.
Instead of arguing about whether abortion is a woman’s legal right, people are fighting over whether to issue passports to the unborn. “It’s really broadening what the anti-abortion movement is going after and trying to force candidates to go there with them,” Kolbi-Molinas says. For the personhood movement, getting GOP presidential contenders like Romney to weigh in on their issue is a win in itself.
By: Kate Sheppard, Mother Jones, November 22, 2011
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