Mitt Romney Pressured Single Mother

Mitt Romney spends the next leg of his campaign courting evangelical voters in South Carolina, his Mormon faith is expected to re-emerge as a subject of serious scrutiny. But concerns won’t belong exclusively to theologically suspicious Baptists: a newly revealed episode from the candidate’s time as a lay leader in the LDS church could raise eyebrows among women’s advocates.
While serving as bishop of a Mormon congregation near Boston in the early 80’s, Romney once threatened to excommunicate a young single mother if she did not give her soon-to-be-born son up for adoption, according to a passage from a forthcoming book, “The Real Romney.” excerpted this week in Vanity Fair.
The anecdote, which Romney has disputed, sheds new light on a compelling part of the candidate’s religious life—one that serves, politically, as a double-edged sword. On one hand Romney’s time spent as a minister of his faith gave him the unique opportunity of serving low-income Boston neighborhoods, undercutting the narrative that he’s an out-of-touch millionaire. On the other, his role as a representative of the church sometimes put him in a position of standing up for politically unsavory teachings.


Romney has since changed course on abortion. Bassett recently reported on an ad released by Newt Gingrich's campaign that attacked Romney as "pro-abortion." The story clarifies Romney's current position:


To be clear, Romney is not, as the Gingrich ad accuses, "pro-abortion" or even pro-contraception. He supports overturning Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision that protects a woman's right to have an abortion before the fetus is viable outside the womb. And although he attended Planned Parenthood fund-raisers and supported taxpayer funding for abortion before changing his stance in 2005, Romney now says he would eliminate the Title X family planning program, which funds Planned Parenthood and provides affordable contraception and other basic medical care to millions of uninsured and low-income women.