Join the club: Mitt Romney and pro-life conversion.(POLITICS)

FOR decades, pro-life activists have been in the business of winning hearts and minds to their cause. Powerful arguments about the humanity of the unborn have moved public opinion, and a pro-life political force has made ambitious politicians feel the heat, whether or not they see the light. Pro-lifers' faith in the power of persuasion has been rewarded, and their political clout increased, by important converts, including Presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. Mitt Romney has also changed his position on abortion, but some social conservatives argue that membership in their ranks should be closed to this most recent convert with presidential ambitions.

In 1967, Gov. Ronald Reagan signed a liberal abortion law, declaring, "I'm fully sympathetic with attempts to liberalize the outdated abortion law now on the books in California." Reagan later changed his mind and expressed regret for signing a measure that saw more abortions performed in California than in any other state before Roe v. Wade. He became a committed pro-life politician and backed the first pro-life plank in the Republican platform. George W. Bush ran as a pro-choice politician in his 1978 congressional campaign, but held pro-life views when he ran for the governorship of Texas in 1994. His father too once favored abortion rights, but took a pro-life position in the 1980 presidential campaign.

When Sam Brownback was running in a GOP congressional primary in 1994, he initially rebuffed a pro-life group's endorsement, according to a recent account in The New Republic. In that article, a former president of Kansans for Life recalls that Brownback was "unfamiliar with the anti-abortion lexicon" 20 years after Roe v. Wade, and that Brownback described himself as "more in line with the view of Nancy Kassebaum," the state's pro-choice junior GOP senator. But Brownback wound up facing a primary challenger who, as the article puts it, "was about as pro-life as you could get without earning yourself a restraining order." Prior to the race, Brownback had never had to defend his abortion views; but by Primary Day he was on the record as an abortion opponent. The article plausibly asserts that Brownback, who has formed a presidential exploratory committee, "is closing in on a decade as the leading social conservative in the U.S. Senate" (though Rick Santorum also has a claim to that title).

Although the experiences of three presidents and Sam Brownback strongly support the argument that genuine conversions happen, and that pro-life converts remain faithful, Mitt Romney's change of heart has been met in some conservative quarters with hostile skepticism.

Romney ran as a pro-choice candidate in his 1994 Senate race against Ted Kennedy and in his 2002 gubernatorial campaign. In 1994, he revealed that a relative had died of a botched abortion in the 1960s, and said, "It is since that time that my mother and my family have been committed to the belief that we can believe as we want, but we will not force our beliefs on others on that matter, and you will not see me wavering on that." In 2002, he assured Planned Parenthood and NARAL that he supported "the substance of the Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade"; he also said, "Women should be free to choose based on their own beliefs, not mine and not the government's."

During his gubernatorial campaign, he won the endorsement of the abortion-rights group Republican Majority for Choice. But three years later, the group's co-chairman ...