A Quantum Theory of Romney’s Abortion Position

“There’s no legislation with regards to abortion that I’m familiar with that would become part of my agenda,” Mitt Romney told the editorial board of the Des Moines Register. “I am pro-life and believe that abortion should be limited to only instances of rape, incest, or to save the life of the mother,” Mitt Romney wrote in “My Pro-Life Pledge,” a column in the National Review last summer. Some parsers suggested that Mitt was relying heavily on words like “legislation,” “I’m familiar with,” and, perhaps, every other phrase in the sentence, thus technically not contradicting himself (while not moving to the center, either). Nominating anti-Roe Supreme Court Justices, one of the things Romney has said he’d do, is not, after all, a legislative act. But even that doesn’t work, because others are: he said that he’d cut off funding for Planned Parenthood and “advocate for and support a Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act to protect unborn children who are capable of feeling pain from abortion.” And anyway, his campaign spokeswoman responded to a question today from NRO by saying, “Governor Romney would of course support legislation aimed at providing greater protections for life.” Perhaps the words Romney finds most pliable are “I’m” and “my.”

How hopeful does a person have to be to get excited when Romney appears to have a new position on abortion, or on anything? The trick here is that he has been known to change his position, sometimes quite radically. There is a complicated taxonomy here: there are the true flip-flops (a position has truly been abandoned), the flare-flops (a flash that conveys the impression of change, when none is there), and sheer floppiness (the condition in which Romney has no true belief or policy, and so just says anything). The Mittologist must learn to tell them apart. It is the sort of task one wishes one could assign to the quantum physicists who won the Nobel this morning; they’d just have to substitute the cat in the box who, in Schrödinger’s classic formulation, is simultaneously alive and dead, with a dog in a crate strapped to the top of a car, and they’d be all set for a trip to Romneyland.

Romney’s vast emptiness can make it harder to spot the fixed points that are there. When he was trying to get elected in Massachusetts, he mentioned an in-law who had died after an illegal abortion and was outraged by the suggestion that he would ever be less than supportive of a woman’s right to choose. Since then, with fits and starts, he has steadily abandoned and worked to undermine that right, and even lied about his past positions. (William Saletan has a chronology.) This is ultimately a more harmful hypocrisy than that, say, of a “pro-life” Congressman who tried to persuade his mistress to have an abortion. There is, at this point—the one where the election is taking place—plenty to suggest that on the broader issue of women’s health Romney would cause actual harm, particularly in the lives of poor women. And when Romney had the right to choose a running mate, he picked Paul Ryan, who has always been opposed to abortion rights. One hopes, as I wrote over at Daily Comment, that abortion comes up in the Vice-Presidential debate; it is a loss that it didn’t in the first Presidential one.

If there is any logic to Romney’s wiggles it is opportunism, with swerves toward power and toward those whose lives are most similar to his own. That is not the same thing as being a moderate. Maybe he doesn’t mean it—but how would one find out? One doesn’t want to play dice with a Presidential election.

Original Article
Source: new yorker
Author: Amy Davidson