While the president’s stump speech focuses largely on the economy, the campaign has been working diligently to secure a strong lead among women voters by juxtaposing President Obama’s commitment to women’s health care with Mitt Romney’s “scary“positions on abortion and contraception.
In his selection of Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney has made Democrats’ job a whole lot easier by tying Romney to a slew of anti-abortion, anti-Planned Parenthood votes that Paul Ryan has taken in the last few years.
David Axelrod, an adviser to the Obama campaign, mentioned Ryan’s anti-abortion stance fits nicely with Romney’s while making the rounds on the Sunday shows.
“I think they are kindred spirits on some of these policies, and certainly on the social issues,” Axelrod said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “They have come together banning abortion and so on.”
In July, the Romney campaign cried foul when an Obama campaign ad claimed that the Republican nominee opposed abortion even in cases of rape and incest. At the time, the campaign told TPM that the ad was “false” and a “desperate attempt to change the subject” from the faltering economy. Romney has expressed support for those exceptions.
But Ryan is a different story. When Republicans took back the House of Representatives in 2010, they passed a series of bills limiting abortion rights and women’s access to contraceptive care. Ryan voted for all of them, including legislation that would ban abortion in all cases. This Sanctity of Human Life Act, to which he signed on to as a co-sponsor, would also criminalize some forms of birth control. He also voted for a bill abortion-rights activist blasted as the “Let Women Die Act,” which would allow hospitals to refuse to perform a life-saving abortion.
Ryan also voted to defund Planned Parenthood and government funding for family planning, which fits Obama’s narrative that Romney is on the wrong side of women’s health issues. The Obama campaign is already using Romney’s promise to defund Planned Parenthood in ads meant to appeal to women voters.
