Reassessing Sexual Politics

[Judi Lynn]

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
Newsweek
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.

More:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20322033/site/newsweek/

[Donkeykick]

1. Yeah...

looks like the pachyderms have their very own Lieberman, huh. :eyes:

[PDX Bara]

2. Thank goodness I'm too old

...to multiply. These people really lost me years ago when they started to try telling me that I have no control over certain aspects of my being. Aren't these the people that want to curtail the social programs that need to be in place for the resulting population explosion?