Romney’s campaign has pushed back on this narrative forcefully, pointing to
Romney’s decision in July 2005 to veto the bill Santorum and Gingrich have referenced, which mandated that all Catholic hospitals provide the morning-after pill to all rape victims. (The Church instructs hospitals to first test whether a rape victim has conceived; if she has not, the morning-after pill may be given to prevent conception.) Romney not only vetoed the bill, but forcefully spoke up against it.
“Yesterday I vetoed a bill that the Legislature forwarded to my desk,” Romney wrote in a Boston Globe op-ed. “Though described by its sponsors as a measure relating to contraception, there is more to it than that. The bill does not involve only the prevention of conception: The drug it authorizes would also terminate life after conception.”
Unsurprisingly, the Massachusetts legislature overrode Romney’s veto. It wasn’t a close vote, either: State senators unanimously voted for the bill, joined by 139 House members. Only 16 House members voted to uphold the veto.
But the saga didn’t end there. On December 7, the state’s
Department of Public Health stated that Catholic hospitals remained legally exempt from the mandate to distribute emergency contraception, despite the fact that the new law included no religious exemption. The department contended that the new law did not nullify a 1975 statute that did provide an exemption for hospitals that wished not to provide abortion or contraception for religious reasons.
“We feel very clearly that the two laws don’t cancel each other out and basically work in harmony with each other,” department commissioner Paul Cote Jr. told the Boston Globe.
On that same day, Romney said, “
My own view is that every hospital should provide to rape victims information about emergency contraception, or emergency contraception itself.” The Boston Herald reported that the Romney administration denied there was any tension between Romney’s statement and the DPH’s contention that Catholic hospitals were exempt from the mandate: “Romney spokesman Eric Fehrnstrom denied Romney’s comments yesterday are inconsistent with the action by the DPH he oversees: ‘
The governor’s view is not inconsistent with what the law is because the current law allows a hospital to provide emergency information, emergency contraception itself, or neither.’”
That same day, Romney, acting on advice from his own lawyer, decided the DPH’s decision could not stand. “Romney reversed course on the state’s new emergency contraception law yesterday, saying that all hospitals in the state will be obligated to provide the morning-after pill to rape victims,” reported the Boston Globe on December 9.
Romney, the Globe added, “said yesterday that he had changed direction after his legal counsel, Mark D. Nielsen, concluded Wednesday that
the new law supersedes a preexisting statute that says private hospitals cannot be forced to provide abortions or contraception.”
Anne Fox, president of Massachusetts Citizens for Life, reflects on the incident with more sympathy for Romney. “His lawyers came in and said, ‘This is the way it has to be,’” she says of the December 2005 incident. “I’m not sure how many people would have said, ‘Well, I don’t care.’ I don’t know what else he might have done.”
Romney: Flip-Flopping on Contraception? - Katrina Trinko - National Review Online