That sounds rather high. A “pro-life” sort really should focus on contraceptive use and other things, but straight logic doesn’t often work in this area, does it?

Oh, that’s right. He’s my representative. Or at least, he’s the representative of the congressional district in which I reside, no matter how often I vote for anyone running against him.

So… Rep. Smith is an odd case. On the one hand, this is totally in character for him – on abortion, he’s smack in the middle of wingnutville. If you look at his speeches from a decade ago, he’s right there with the people who’d want to ban or restrict many forms of birth control, if it were politically viable to attempt something like that. Again, going back over a decade you can find him doing things like attaching riders to funding bills that tried to re-establish the Global Gag Rule through Congressional action during the Clinton years. (He’s been in congress since 1981)

And yet, he was one of the few Republicans who voted for the Paycheck Fairness Act, to fix the awful Ledbetter decision. When VAWA came up for reauthorization most recently, he not only voted for it, he was one of the speakers urging its reauthorization. In 2000, he wrote the law that reauthorized VAWA. (As a section of a larger bill he authored, the Trafficking Victims Protection Act)

I was just cleaning out all the paper recycling for the past month, and ran across various bits of junk mail from before election day. From the “re-elect Chris Smith” material, you’d never even know he was pro-life. In 2000, he was running around talking about how awful it was that women were not being informed about the link between abortion and breast cancer, and was not at all shy about his pro-life creds.

This time? Not a peep. The only vague hint is how all his mailed campaign materials trumpeted his support of women, both legislatively and through what he’s done under the general heading of “constituent services”. (e.g., when war broke out between Russia and Georgia, he flew to Georgia to negotiate the safe passage of two NJ girls who had been visiting relatives and been trapped by the fighting) These tell me that some campaign advisor told him he needed to focus on getting women to not hate him. (Not that he had anything to worry about – because of district boundaries, he still won with over 70% of the vote)

Even his official biography on his house.gov site mentions pro-life in only one sentence at the end.

So what is this? The possible beginning of an honest change of heart, or at least a softening of his former extreme positions? A wingnut trying to go stealth because it isn’t politically a good move anymore?

I hope it’s the first, because although I plan to keep voting against him I’m also pretty certain this district will keep re-electing him.