A so-called Catholic group that upset Catholics during the 2008 presidential elections by covering up Barack Obama’s pro-abortion views and record is back this time around and has launched a misleading attack on GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney.
Catholics United is attacking Romney over false reports appearing on left-wing blogs claiming Romney profited from owning a company while he was at Bain Capital that has more recently become involved in processing waste disposal for abortion facilities. As LifeNews has reported, Romney had left Bain Capital and Bain Capital had divested itself from the company, Stericycle, by the time it started working with abortion businesses.
Following the left-wing attacks, some political observers worried the Obama campaign would launch an attack on Romney late in the campaign based on this false argument, but Catholics United has already taken it up.
Anthony M. Stevens-Arroyo put up a post at the Catholics United-run blog “Our Daily Thread,” claiming “it is fair to ask what being ‘opposed to abortion’ means to a candidate who assisted this biowaste company in growing to be the largest in the country and made tens of millions from the deal.”
He made it appear Romney made money on Stericycle keeping abortion clinics open by processing its medical waste and questioend whether Romney deserves “a single Catholic vote” as a result.
However, FactCheck.org, a project of the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center, has refuted the false Stericycle attacks, saying, “None of the SEC filings show that Romney was anything but a passive, absentee owner during that time, as both Romney and Bain have long said.”
Bain itself has indicated “Mitt Romney retired from Bain Capital in February 1999. He has had no involvement in the management or investment activities of Bain Capital, or with any of its portfolio companies since that time.”
Assuming Romney was involved with Bain through the end of 1999 and involved in the deal obviously doesn’t make him responsible for Stericycle’s business collected aborted babies from abortion clinics. Bain itself — after Romney left the company — divested from Stericycle well before it began its abortion-connected operations.
As Mother Jones notes: “In 2001, the Bain-Madison Dearborn partnership that had invested in the company sold 40 percent of its holdings in Stericycle for about $88 million—marking a hefty profit on its original investment of $75 million. The Bain-related group sold the rest of its holdings by 2004. It was not until six years later that anti-abortion activists would target Stericycle for collecting medical waste at abortion clinics.”
That Romney wasn’t involved in, approving of, familiar with, or even involved in the company at the time of the Stericycle-aborted bodies disposal business, is further proven by the documentation of the pro-life Stop Stericycle campaign. The campaign began in January 2011 — over a decade after Romney was no longer involved in Bain Capital.
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A report in the left-wing Huffington Post that also refutes the Romney-Stericycle-abortion link claims.
“By the time Bain Capital had made the investment in Stericycle, he had left the firm to run the 2002 Winter Olympic Games. He maintained ownership in Bain and kept holdings in its private equity funds, which included Stericycle stock, but he had no say in the managerial or strategic decisions at the firm, according to Bain officials,” HuffPo reported. “There is no publicly available data showing that either Romney or other officials at Bain knew of Stericycle’s work with Planned Parenthood and abortion clinics before the investment.”
