April 21, 2008 06:12 PM UTC

Schaffer Not "Right to Life" Enough

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• by: Colorado Pols

As The Denver Post reports:

An anti-abortion group is blasting Bob Schaffer, Republican candidate for a Colorado U.S. Senate seat, over his defense of human rights conditions in the Northern Mariana islands, an American territory where allegations that factory workers must undergo forced abortions are common.

Colorado Right to Life accused Schaffer of closing his eyes to reports from Chinese workers on the islands about forced abortions.

“The pro-life movement will no longer give a pass to candidates like Bob Schaffer who look the other way when Chinese women are forced to abort their children,” said Steve Curtis, spokesman for the group and former chairman of the Colorado Republican Party.

“At best Schaffer was negligent investigating coerced abortion in the Mariana Islands,” he said. “Worse, he has voted for permanent normal trade relations with China, rewarding the regime that forces women to abort their children.”

Schaffer, who visited the Marianas in 1999 while in Congress, said allegations of forced abortions were among the things he looked into on that trip.

“I absolutely did not look the other way on this issue,” Schaffer said, saying he interviewed “dozens” of workers and met with local religious leaders about the topic.

A 1998 report by the U.S. Office of Insular Affairs found squalid living conditions for foreign workers in the Marianas.

A statement given to investigators from a Chinese woman showed what happened to workers who got pregnant.

“According to Miss Y, if the company found out a worker became pregnant, they would fire her and return her to China where she would be ‘forced to have an abortion.’ Knowing this, workers who became pregnant either tried to self abort or find someone in Saipan to perform the abortion. Some women ran away and hid so they didn’t have to have an abortion.”

“I found the reports credible,” Schaffer said. “I’ve not seen them refuted.”

Schaffer said during his visit he tried to determine how often abortions occurred.

“In five days, I did not observe a forced abortion or meet anybody who had any knowledge of them,” he said, adding that no subsequent examples were ever brought to him.

You’ve got to love that last quote: “I did not observe a forced abortion.” Really, Bob? Nobody did a forced abortion in front of you? Well, then, if you didn’t see it with your own eyes, it must not have happened, then. This response is Schaffer’s weakest yet, probably because his own conservative base is now the one leveling the hard questions.

It was only a matter of time before social conservatives took notice of the Schaffer/Abramoff scandal’s obvious and troubling implications for them. If anything, continued silence on the matter would have opened groups like Colorado Right to Life to accusations of turning a partisan blind eye on an issue that couldn’t be more central to their mandate.

Looks like the Dick Wadhams strategy of cornering uninformed reporters into bogus whitewashes of this hugely damaging story…just got a lot more complicated.