Allegedly "Pro-Life" Version of Romney Told Catholic Hospitals in Massachusetts to Administer Abortion Pills

It's widely known by now that Obama got his idea for the individual health care mandate from none other than likely GOP nominee, Willard Mitt Romney (aka Dullard Flip Rino).

And it seems that the idea for Obama's HHS mandate forcing religious institutions to pay for contraception, abortifacients, and sterilization may very well have come from none other than ... you guessed it ... Willard Mitt Romney (aka Dullard Flip Rino):

A defining moment in Mitt Romney’s post-pro-life-conversion political career came in his third year as governor of Massachusetts, when he decided Catholic hospitals would be required under his interpretation of a new state law to give rape victims a drug that can induce abortions.

Romney announced this decision — saying it was the “right thing for hospitals” to do — just two days after he had taken the opposite position.

[...]

... when Romney was running for governor, he filled out a questionnaire for NARAL Pro-Choice Massachusetts. It said: “Emergency contraception does not cause abortion. Rather, it prevents pregnancy from occurring. Will you support efforts to increase access to emergency contraception?”

Romney said: “Yes.”

The next year, the Massachusetts legislature considered an “emergency contraception” mandate. It would have allowed pharmacists to sell Plan B — an abortifacient — without a prescription and without parental consent. It also would have required all hospitals to inform rape victims of the availability of such “emergency contraceptives” and provide them to the rape victim if she wanted them even when they would cause an abortion.

Maria Parker of the Massachusetts Catholic Conference, the public policy organization of the state’s Catholic bishops, explained in testimony to the state legislature why Catholic hospitals could not do this.

The normal Catholic ban on artificial contraception did not apply in a rape case, Parker said. But while contraception was acceptable in such a situation, killing an unborn child was not.

[...]

Parker concluded her testimony by quoting what Cardinal Frances George of Chicago had told the Illinois legislature when it proposed a similar law: “Our hospitals cannot and will not comply with this law.”

[...]

The same day the Globe ran its editorial, Romney held a press conference. Now he said his legal counsel had advised him the new emergency contraception law did trump the 1975 conscience law.

“On that basis, I have instructed the Department of Public Health to follow the conclusion of my own legal counsel and to adopt that sounder view,” Romney said. “In my personal view, it’s the right thing for hospitals to provide information and access to emergency contraception to anyone who is a victim of rape.”

A true leader would have said: I will defend the First Amendment right of Catholics to freely exercise their religion — against those who would force them to participate in abortions — all the way to the Supreme Court.

[Read the whole thing]

And this was the allegedly "PRO-LIFE" version of Romney? Too weak-kneed a pro-lifer (or perhaps more likely NOT REALLY A PRO-LIFER AT ALL) to stand up to a little criticism by the freakin' Boston Globe?

And this is the guy who's supposed to take on Obama over Obamacare in general and the HHS mandate in particular? No, the Obama campaign won't point to Romney's own record in this regard in order to deflect attention away from the HHS mandate. No, Romney won't at all fold like a cheap tent under the withering barrage of the Chicago-style campaign machine and the constant anti-life carping of the The Washington Post and The New York Times.

Catholics of all political stripes, and conservatives of whatever faith or no faith, DO NOT support this man to be the nominee of the Republican Party. And if he is nominated, DO NOT vote for him to be President. He is a fraud. He is a pro-abort. He is a big-government-health-care-mandating-religious-liberty-trampling liberal Republican. He is not to be trusted.

I won't vote for him UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, and neither should you.