Evolving history
Elly Peterson owes her career to George Romney, the late governor of Michigan and the father of Governor Mitt Romney.
She says she would never have risen to cochair the Republican National Committee if Romney had not promoted her in Michigan in 1965 to become the first woman to chair a major state political party. She worked to elect him and his lieutenant governor, William Milliken, who succeeded him when Romney became US secretary of housing and urban development in 1969. She worked, too, on Lenore Romney's unsuccessful bid for the US Senate in 1970.
That is why Peterson is dumbfounded to hear that Mitt Romney has described his mother as having been an abortion rights supporter during that campaign. ''If it happened, I'd remember it," she said in a telephone interview from her home in Colorado. ''It didn't, and I don't. The issue in 1970 was jobs, jobs, jobs, and that is what we talked about: the Michigan economy. The Romneys were great ones for talking about issues at the dinner table, though. Maybe she said it there to Mitt."
Lenore Romney's campaign stance is relevant only because her son, a prospective candidate for the GOP presidential nomination in 2008, raised it in 1994, during a debate with Senator Edward M. Kennedy, and he has been sending mixed signals on abortion ever since. ''I believe that abortion should be safe and legal in this country," he said in 1994. ''I have since the time that my mom took that position when she ran in 1970 as a US Senate candidate."
Asked by a Boston Herald reporter to elaborate back then, Romney said a relative he would not name had died from a botched abortion in the 1960s. ''It is since that time that my mother and my family have committed to the belief that we can believe what we want, but we will not force our beliefs on that matter," he said.
Like Peterson, Milliken cannot say for certain that Lenore Romney did not harbor private sentiments in support of abortion rights, but he, too, is skeptical that she ever expressed them on the stump. The Romneys were ''progressive on the income tax, on fair housing, but I can't imagine that Lenore Romney would have been proabortion in the course of that campaign, either publicly or privately, because both Governor Romney and his wife were opposed to the Equal Rights Amendment and had taken a strongly prolife position. Remember this is three years before Roe. That would have been a very courageous, memorable position for her to take."
Detroit Free Press archives yielded no campaign references to abortion, nor did files of The Michigan Women's Historical Center or abortion rights groups in Michigan and Washington, D.C.
Milliken has reason to remember. He and his wife, Helen, supported efforts to repeal Michigan's restrictive abortion laws in the years before Roe v. Wade. Michigan voters rejected a referendum on reform in 1972, even as the high court was considering the case that would overturn all state abortion laws weeks later.
At different times during the 1970s, both Helen Milliken and Elly Peterson served as chairwomen of ERAmerica, the failed campaign to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment. ''We were all disappointed when the Romneys opposed the ERA," Bill Milliken recalled, ''but we understood it. The Mormon Church lobbied hard nationally to defeat it, and George had been a bishop in his church."
''The idea that Lenore would defy her church is hard to believe," Peterson said. ''I can't rule it out, but I think I would remember it." The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints opposes abortion except in cases of rape or incest or when the life of the mother is endangered.
Julie Teer, Romney's press secretary, has ignored repeated requests to speak with the governor about his evolving abortion views, his mother's campaign, and the reported abortion-related death in their family. ''Your request is in the inbox," she wrote in an e-mail last Wednesday. ''I will get back to you ASAP."
Whenever you're ready, governor.
Eileen McNamara is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at mcnamara@globe.com. 