When It Comes to Politicians, Don’t Expect Sincerity on Abortion 
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by Rich Lowry
March 14, 2007
LifeNews.com Note: Rich Lowry is an editor at National Review Online.
Rudy Giuliani has made a strategic choice in the Republican primary contest. He will stay pro-choice on the issue of abortion, and thus avoid the flip-flopper label that has so harmed former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney.
But Giuliani has a flip-flop in his past. When he first began running for New York City mayor in 1989, he said that he personally opposed abortion, favored overturning Roe v. Wade and opposed public financing of abortions. During that campaign he morphed into an unmodulated pro-choicer. He dropped talk of opposing Roe v. Wade and endorsed taxpayer funding of abortion. By the time he was mayor, he was declaring a "Planned Parenthood Day" in New York and all but pledging to perform abortions himself, should it ever come to that.
Now that’s he’s running for president he says that he "hates" abortion — something he didn’t mention when he gave opening remarks at NARAL’s "Champions of Choice" lunch in April 2001. (Back then, New Yorkers had a "distinguished tradition" of promoting abortion.) He now supports a partial-birth ban, which he had opposed. His aides say he supports — or wouldn’t seek to change — the Hyde amendment banning Medicaid financing of most abortions, even though he once opposed it.
And these peregrinations are from the candidate who prides himself on fearless straight-talk. None of this is by way of dumping particularly on Giuliani, but to illustrate the governing principle of abortion politics in America: Almost no major politician really cares about it.
What are the odds that every Democratic politician with presidential hopes who once expressed pro-life sentiments — Jesse Jackson, Dick Gephardt, Al Gore, even the fringe candidate Dennis Kucinich — would have epiphanies on abortion that would send them all in the pro-choice direction? Or that both George Bushes would become more pro-life as it happened to suit their ambitions?
It is a little like the athletes who earnestly insist they’ve always wanted to play for a given team in a given city — but that team almost always happens to be the one that offered the most money.
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