New York Times Examines Antiabortion Leaders’ Support For GOP Presidential Candidates, Effect Of Giuliani’s Abortion Rights Stance

August 1, 2007 – 9:51 pm | posted in Abortion

With former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani as the first Republican presidential candidate in a generation to support abortion rights, abortion opponents are trying to “adjust to a strikingly different political landscape,” the New York Times reports. For 30 years, antiabortion advocates have worked with the Republican Party to win a “series of victories in legislatures and courts and stands tantalizingly close to winning even more,” according to the Times. However, some experts have said that a “convergence of forces,” including the early primaries in moderate states such as California, might have “diminished the influence of the antiabortion movement on the Republican nominating process,” the Times reports.

Antiabortion leaders are dividing their support among the Republican presidential candidates, including Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and former Sen. Fred Thompson (Tenn.), who has not yet formally announced his candidacy. At the Republican straw poll in Iowa scheduled for next month, abortion opponents plan to circulate a petition calling on the Republican party to “reassert its values, honor its platform and choose an antiabortion nominee,” the Times reports. According to the Times, most of the Republican candidates are “scrambling to demonstrate both their antiabortion credentials and their ability to win.”

Antiabortion advocates have “so much at stake” in the 2008 election that some of Giuliani’s supporters have made a “strikingly counterintuitive case: that abortion opponents should cast their lot with Mr. Giuliani, despite his long support for legalized abortion,” according to the Times. Giuliani’s supporters say that abortion-rights opponents should back him because he could beat the Democratic nominee and he is “sensitive to the need to reduce abortions, increase adoptions and empower the states to regulate abortion.” According to the Times, Giuliani also has pledged to appoint “strict constructionists” to the U.S. Supreme Court, which is “widely considered political code for judges with a conservative agenda.”

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“Our goal is to get a pro-life president, so we can be confident of his position on legislation and confident of his judges,” Kim Lehman, president of the Iowa Right to Life Committee, said, adding that the majority of Iowa voters oppose abortion. James Bopp, an attorney who represents Wisconsin Right to Life and who recently has signed on as an adviser to the Romney campaign, said, “For the Republican Party to nominate a pro-choice candidate would be very destructive of the party.” He added that a Republican nominee who supported abortion rights “would essentially be at war with the base, and that would manifest itself in a lot of different ways.”

Andrew Kohut, president of the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, said a recent poll analysis suggests that some antiabortion voters might be willing to consider nominating an abortion-rights supporter. Jennifer Stockman, co-chair of the Republican Majority for Choice, said she thinks it is “heartening” that a “moderate is doing so well and that so many conservatives believe in [Giuliani] as well” (Toner, New York Times, 7/30).

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