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Tuesday, Aug 28, 2012 3:14 PM UTC

Romney: No better than Ryan

Paul Ryan has taken most of the flak for the GOP ticket's antiabortion positions. But Mitt Romney is just as bad

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Topics: Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan, Republican Party, 2012 Elections, Abortion,

Romney: No better than Ryan (Credit: AP/Charles Dharapak)

Throughout this election year, Republican candidates have competed to see who could take the most retrograde positions on issues concerning women’s health and rights. These antics were dismissed by many as little more than posturing for primary votes. This week, reality will intervene when the Republican Party embraces some of the worst of these for its official party position.

Just last week, the Romney-Ryan led Republican Party voted to include dangerously restrictive language into their Party Platform position on abortion. In doing so, they are adopting backward-looking and anti-woman policies that cannot be dismissed as campaign rhetoric. The positions candidates have been taking are now displayed as the goal they seek. Positions once thought to be extreme are officially mainstream for the Republican Party of 2012.

The Republican Party platform includes a human life amendment that would criminalize abortion nationwide, with no exceptions for rape and incest. That’s right, the party that claims to abhor the heavy hand of government is using it as a club to impose its own view on a woman’s most private and deeply personal decisions, making her and her doctor criminals in the process.

Party platforms are declarations of principles and values used to show voters what the party stands for and how a party would like to see their leaders govern. These platforms are written with the direction and consent of their Presidential candidates. Through this action, we now know precisely what Mitt Romney hopes to accomplish if elected President.

Some have argued that Romney’s position is not as extreme as the platform, that Romney accepts exceptions to the general criminalization of abortion. They are especially quick to say Romney’s position differs from Paul Ryan’s, the person he chose as his running mate. Apparently they are fearful that women will come to understand that Ryan is more than ultra conservative on fiscal issues; he also has co-sponsored 38 anti-abortion measures, one of which attempted to redefine rape as forcible rape.

The attempt to distinguish between Romney and Ryan is an exercise in deception. Both of them vow to take away federal funding for Planned Parenthood’s birth control programs, a vital healthcare service for millions of women. More important, the platform language on which Romney will run reflects Ryan’s extreme position, the very one apologists attempt to say is “not Romney’s.”

The apologists also point to Romney’s and Ryan’s efforts to distance themselves from Todd Akin and his outrageous comments on legitimate rape and the mythology that women who are raped rarely get pregnant. The record shows that Ryan and Akin have been in lockstep on principle, if not rhetoric, for years – even working together to narrow the definition of rape and outlaw abortion for rape victims.

In an interview last week with KDKA News in Pennsylvania, Paul Ryan called this important conversation a “distraction.” That’s what politicians say when the public starts to pay attention to one of their positions that is unpalatable and usually promoted in the shadows of the legislative process to appease the base.

But what is a distraction for Paul Ryan is an existential threat to American women. Our full social, political and economic equality has never been in greater political jeopardy. That’s why we have to pay attention, and we have to get involved.

Kate Michelman is the former president of NARAL Pro-Choice America. More Kate Michelman.

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