Romney's journey to the right

Social issue stands hardened since '02

In Governor Mitt Romney's metamorphosis from social moderate to self-styled conservative presidential candidate, Nov. 9, 2004 , stands out as a seminal date.

On that day, Romney and two aides met in his State House office with renowned Harvard University stem cell researcher Douglas A. Melton. In Romney's retelling, Melton coolly explained how his work relied on cloning human embryos.

" I sat down with a researcher. And he said, 'Look, you don't have to think about this stem cell research as a moral issue, because we kill the embryos after 14 days,' " Romney recalled on " The Charlie Rose Show " last June, characterizing the meeting as a watershed moment for him. "That struck me as he said that."

Melton remembers the session differently.

"Governor Romney has mischaracterized my position; we didn't discuss killing or anything related to it," he said in a statement last week. "I explained my work to him, told him about my deeply held respect for life, and explained that my work focuses on improving the lives of those suffering from debilitating diseases."

In the years since that meeting, Romney has cast his education on stem cells as his awakening on "life" issues, triggering, for example, his change to a vocal anti abortion stance after years of supporting abortion rights. More broadly, the stem cell debate became a catalyst for Romney to methodically redefine himself as a conservative for 2008.

Romney attacked Harvard and the controversial cloning technique in interviews with prominent conservative journalists. He told Republicans in Spartanburg, S.C., that "science must respect the sanctity of human life." He sent out a political fund-raising letter touting his valiant fight against the liberal establishment over what he called "human cloning."

Now, with less than three weeks left in office, the governor will leave Beacon Hill a far more socially conservative voice than when he arrived in 2002, and when he ran for Senate in 1994. On stem cell research, abortion, emergency contraception, abstinence education, and gay rights, Romney's shifts to more conservative positions have estranged him from a state that elected him as a moderate.

Yet, while Romney's tack rightward has helped make him a top-tier national candidate, his past stances as a Massachusetts politician have stirred doubt among Republican activists, bloggers, pundits, and prominent Christian leaders about whether he is a true conservative or merely repackaged himself for political gain.

"They're going to look at Romney, and they're going to say, 'Is [it] really true or is he being, you know, expedient?' " Washington Examiner reporter Bill Sammon said on Fox News Wednesday.

The most recent wrinkle for Romney has been the resurfacing of his comments on gay rights during his unsuccessful 1994 Senate challenge to Edward M. Kennedy. He promised "more effective leadership" than Kennedy on winning "full equality" for gays and lesbians, opposed a federal constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, and advocated gays serving openly in the military.

Starting in 2004, Romney, though he continued to preach tolerance toward gays and lesbians, pressed Congress to pass a federal same-sex marriage ban and sought to change state anti discrimination laws so a Catholic adoption agency could deny services to gay couples. He also stopped calling for gays to serve openly in the armed forces.

But gay rights is not the only controversial social issue on which Romney's views have hardened.

At a campaign appearance at Brandeis University in June 2002, Romney strongly endorsed stem cell research. At that event and in several instances since, he declined to offer an opinion on embryo cloning, which many scientists believe holds the most promise for curing disease. His aides said he needed to study it more.

But on Feb. 10, 2005, three months after his meeting with Melton, Romney came out strongly against the cloning technique, saying in a New York Times story that the method breached an "ethical boundary." He vowed to press for legislation to criminalize the work.

Romney's opposition stunned scientists, lawmakers, and observers because of his past statements endorsing, at least in general terms, embryonic stem cell research. Six months earlier, his wife, Ann, had expressed hope publicly that stem cells would hold a cure for her disease, multiple sclerosis.

In addition to Melton, Romney consulted with at least two critics of the cloning technique in formulating his position, according to his office -- William B. Hurlbut, a Stanford ethicist and member of the President's Council on Bioethics, and the Rev. Tadeusz Pacholczuk of the National Catholic Bioethics Center.

After Romney made his position known, some scientists wondered if he simply didn't fully understand stem cell research. So they held a meeting with his deputy chief of staff, Peter Flaherty. In that meeting, said Leonard Zon, a stem cell scientist at Children's Hospital Boston who participated, Flaherty made clear that they knew the issue inside and out.

"I felt that they had thought this through and that their reasons for making this decision either was that he was a true believer or that there were other things going on politically," Zon said.

Many critics accused Romney of the latter. "There's evidence that he is clearly concerned with the national agenda," said Senate President Robert E. Travaglini, who led efforts to get a stem cell bill passed over Romney's objections.

But Flaherty contends that Romney arrived at his position after heartfelt reflection.

"He worked long and hard to get all of the information he needed to make a thoughtful and informed decision," Flaherty said. "I could tell that he was really thinking this one out and searching inside himself."

It was during that reflection on stem cells, Romney said, that he realized he had been wrong about abortion for years.

In the 1994 Senate campaign, Romney said abortion should be safe and legal. He also voiced support for the controversial abortion pill RU-486. In a debate with Kennedy that year, he explained how his belief in abortion rights had been shaped by the death of a close family friend years before from an illegal abortion.

When he ran for governor in 2002, Romney said in questionnaires from two reproductive rights groups that he supported Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision making abortion legal. On the survey from NARAL Pro-Choice Massachusetts, he added this statement: "I respect and will protect a women's right to choose. This choice is a deeply personal one. Women should be free to choose based on their own beliefs, not mine and not the government's."

But in mid-2005, Romney announced that his position on abortion had "evolved and deepened" as governor, in large part after his epiphany on stem cell research. He began calling himself "firmly pro life."

"In considering the issue of embryo cloning and embryo farming, I saw where the harsh logic of abortion can lead -- to the view of innocent new life as nothing more than research material or a commodity to be exploited," Romney wrote in an op-ed in the Globe that July.

He elaborated in an interview last week with the National Review. "I know in the four years I have served as governor I have learned and grown from the exposure to the thousands of good-hearted people who are working to change the culture in our country," Romney was quoted. "I'm committed to promoting the culture of life. Like Ronald Reagan, and [Illinois congressman] Henry Hyde, and others who became pro life, I had this issue wrong in the past."

The tangible result of Romney's abortion shift was his veto of a bill in July 2005 to make the so-called morning-after pill available over the counter at Massachusetts pharmacies and to require hospitals to make it available to rape victims. The governor returned from a New Hampshire vacation to veto the bill.

The emergency contraception pill, also called Plan B, is a high dose of hormones women can take within days of having sex to prevent an unwanted pregnancy. Supporters say it halts ovulation, fertilization, or implantation of a fertilized egg in the uterine wall, but has no effect on a firmly implanted egg. Opponents who believe that life begins at conception contend that it can cause a "chemical abortion" by hampering implantation in the uterine wall.

The veto, which the Legislature eventually overrode, drew condemnation from reproductive rights advocates, because in 2002, Romney had answered "yes" to their survey questions about whether he supported efforts to increase access to emergency contraception.

On abstinence education, the pattern was similar: In the 2002 campaign, Romney said "yes" on a NARAL survey to this question: "Do you support comprehensive, age-appropriate family life/sexuality education in the public schools, and oppose 'abstinence-only' sexuality programs?"

But earlier this year, Romney's administration, using a federal grant, contracted with a program called Healthy Futures to provide abstinence-only education for 12- to 14-year-olds, primarily in Hispanic and black communities.

Such abstinence-only programs are controversial because they deliberately do not address condoms and other methods of contraception. Romney aides at the time said the curriculum would be taught alongside more comprehensive sex education, but the Department of Public Health offered assurances that the program and any materials "do not and will not promote contraception and/or condom use."

Even Romney's fiercest defenders acknowledge that, since his election campaigns in 1994 and 2002, his positions have evolved significantly.

"Since 1994, Gov. Romney has clearly learned a lot about social conservatism," Charles Mitchell, a contributor to the blog Evangelicals for Mitt, wrote recently. "That's why he has governed the way he has regarding abortion, stem cells, and 'gay marriage.' He campaigned then as a social liberal, which he is not now."

Romney's communications director, Eric Fehrnstrom, said last week that the governor should be "judged on his four-year record in office."

"In one of the most liberal states in the country, he has governed as a mainstream conservative," Fehrnstrom said. "He's gone after wasteful spending, he's defended traditional marriage, he pushed to bring abstinence education to the classroom, he fought against embryonic cloning, and he stood up and vetoed the emergency contraception bill. Through it all, he has taken on the entrenched Democratic political establishment, which has opposed him at every turn."

Romney and his aides have, in the past, been sharply critical of politicians who changed their positions. When Democratic opponent Shannon O'Brien said in 2002 that she'd sign a bill legalizing gay marriage, Fehrnstrom derided her by saying she "changes her mind so often that she looks like a weathervane in a hurricane."

And at the 2004 Republican National Convention, Romney accused Senator John F. Kerry of being a flip-flopper. But now, as Romney's candidacy has gained steam, he's getting similar treatment.

Andrew Sullivan, in his blog last week, slammed Romney for his evolution on social issues. "He really is John Kerry's successor as a candidate from Massachusetts," Sullivan wrote. "He'll say anything and everything to get elected."

Part of what's been causing trouble for Romney recently is a long screed written and widely distributed by a local group, MassResistance, which contends that Romney is not the conservative candidate he claims to be. The document has been circulating through Republican quarters over the past couple weeks.

Romney supporters such as Fulton Sheen, a Republican state representative in Michigan who is helping to lead the governor's 2008 efforts in the state, say what is important is that Romney does not retreat from his current positions on social issues.

"I'm a Christian believer. If I didn't believe in redemption, I wouldn't be able to stand on my own beliefs," Sheen said. "As far as I'm concerned, if someone makes a change and says, 'At one time I was here and I've come to this conclusion now or I've changed my position here or there' -- you know, I can handle that."

Steve Scheffler, president of the Iowa Christian Alliance, notes that Romney's moderate past needs to be kept in perspective when thinking about who will win the 2008 Republican nomination. Every leading candidate, including Senator John McCain of Arizona and former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, will have problems winning over voters in the conservative base, Scheffler said.

Scott Helman can be reached at shelman@globe.com.

(Correction: Because of an editing error, the word "silent" was omitted from a description of Governor Mitt Romney's former position on stem cell research in a graphic accompanying a Page One story yesterday about his positions on social issues. The sentence should have read: Romney strongly endorsed stem cell research during the 2002 campaign, though he was silent on the controversial technique of " therapeutic cloning," or cloning human embryos.)