Christie Not Truthful About Abortion Conversion
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Chris Christie’s comments about how and when he went from pro-choice to pro-life are under scrutiny.
It goes like this: In 1995, when he was in his first year as a Morris County freeholder and his wife Mary Pat was in the early stages of pregnancy with the couple’s second child, Sarah, Christie heard his daughter’s heartbeat in a pre-natal scan.
“My wife and I went for a doctor’s appointment and they put the Doppler on my wife’s abdomen, and she was not showing at all at that point. And I heard that heartbeat really strong,” Christie told Fox News host Bill O’Reilly in July. “It turned it for me. On that ride home, I said my position is not justifiable. That’s a life, and I cannot countenance the taking of that life.”
But the public record — made up of Christie’s own words as quoted or paraphrased in three newspaper articles from nearly a year after Christie’s self-described conversion, and his own prepared statement read into the minutes of a Morris County Freeholder Board meeting at the same time — suggests a more complicated story.
…in three contemporaneous newspaper articles about the freeholder meeting and a working session leading up to it, Christie was more explicit about his support for abortion rights in general.
“I’m pro-choice, but I think this procedure is reprehensible,” Christie said, according to a Bergen Record article published on July 10, 1996.
A Star-Ledger article from the same date also said Christie “considers himself pro-choice but said he was outraged by this issue,” and then quotes him saying “it offended me and my sensibilities. When you take a position of choice, you don’t have that in mind.” And a July 11 Star-Ledger article noted that the resolution, drafted by a different freeholder, “first was raised at Tuesday’s freeholder work session by proclaimed pro-choice Freeholder Chris Christie, who was absent last night.”
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