Abortion: Mitt Romney's Embarrassment

When the Republicans reunite at the Tampa, Florida city center to approve their candidate to the White House, Mitt Romney is to avoid a scenario that could spoil the message that he meant to relay to America. Barack Obama’s rival in the presidential election is not ready to launch into the creed of the culture war, a war of values on social questions. In 1992, the ultraconservative Pat Buchanan had radicalized the Republican rhetoric during the Houston convention in giving a speech that dramatized the “religious war” between Democrats and Republicans on the subject of abortion and gay rights.

Sunday, close to the convention center, barricaded behind an impressive security operation, hundreds of supporters of the NGO Freedom and Faith Coalition drummed up their message against the voluntary interruption of a pregnancy, an act legalized in 1973 by the United States Supreme Court in its Roe v. Wade decision. A sad candidate at the inauguration during the Republican primaries, Newt Gingrich used the hyperbole to describe the current president: Barack Obama is the “most radical pro-abortion president in American history.”

For Mitt Romney, who made economics his central campaign issue, the return to the question of abortion on the media scene is embarrassing. In Tampa, the Boston Republican should take up the challenge to bring together the supporters of a fiscal conservatism born out of the business arenas and the partisans of a social conservatism promoted by Evangelicals. Without an alliance between the two groups, a victory on November 6 seems very hypothetical.

And yet the election program that the Republican convention is supposed to adopt these days defends a radical position in the matter: Abortion should be completely prohibited in all circumstances, even in cases of rape and incest. The proposed text, submitted to 2,286 Republican delegates, calls for criminalization of the whole institution which practices abortion and for putting the ban in the Constitution. Alluding to the 1776 Declaration of Independence, the text reaffirms the “sacred nature of human life and reaffirms that the fetus has a fundamental right to life that cannot be taken away.”

President of the commission charged with drawing up the convention’s electoral program, Virginia governor Bob McDonnell did not fear the effects of such a platform on the independent voters. “What’s important in this election, it’s to know how we are going to put the greatest country in the world to work and to free it of its debt.” The polls for the instance look like he has a point. Taking up 47 percent of prospective voters when it is a question of who will better run the world’s premier economy, Mitt Romney leads the race ahead of Barack Obama (46 percent).

Todd Akin, however, showed that abortion is not going to fall off of voters’ radars so easily. A couple of days ago, the Missouri Congressman, who is in the senate race this fall, provoked a scandal in declaring that there were forced rapes and others that are more or less provoked. Losing himself in unconvincing explanations, he noted that women who are victims of it have the means to avoid pregnancy by an internal anatomical mechanism. The ex-governor of Massachusetts immediately condemned this remark without so much as reiterating it, for fear of starting hostilities within the party. The punters of the Republican Party urged Todd Akin in vain to give up his candidacy for the senate; with this scandal, the prospect of regaining the majority in the upper chamber of Congress complicates itself.

Whether the question of abortion resurfaces in Tampa, it has already had the lead stories in the American press this spring. Under the pressure of conservatives and the tea party, several Republican states henceforth impose, on women wanting to abort, intravaginal ultrasounds, after which they have to watch the image of the fetus and decide “in full knowledge of the cause.” New York Times columnist Nicolas Kristof deplores this “war on women” and denounces a practice authorized by the public power that borders on rape — the last straw for a party more or less the antithesis. Today, 50 percent of Democrats estimate that a woman should always have the power to abort, versus 26 percent of Republicans. On the national scale, only 22 percent of Americans, according to a Gallup poll, would forbid abortion in cases of rape or incest.