According to Politico, Mitt Romney has begun to assert his pro-life credentials which have recently come under attack from Newt Gingrich.
The problem with his assertion is this: His decision to include taxpayer funded abortions in his health care overhaul, and his decision to award Planned Parenthood a seat on a health care advisory board the overhaul established, came after, not before, Romney's conversion on abortion. Campaign spokesmen have said that Romney had no choice regarding taxpayer-funded abortions given a string of Massachusetts court rulings. But, I am not sure that would have satisfied the position articulated by the USCCB when it opposed Obama's health care plan. The USCCB, you will recall, said that the guarantees against taxpayer funded abortions in the Obama health care reform were insufficiently airtight. In Romney's health care law, there were no such guarantees at all. If the price of extending health care means extending taxpayer-funded abortion, that is a price the USCCB clearly would not have paid.
And, additionally, there were no court rulings in Massachusetts requiring Romney to award Planned Parenthood, by statute, a seat on the advisory board. Nor were there any court rulings preventing him from awarding a seat to a pro-life organization, say, the Catholic Church which maintains a lot of health care programs in the Bay State.
If Romney's health care plan had been passed before his conversion to the pro-life cause, you would not hear a peep out of me. I love converts. But, it happened after that conversion and raises serious questions about the significance of that conversion. I am gald he has seen the light, but if that light did not shine on his health care law, what good is it?
