Republican candidate’s team pushed centrist image despite policies that show otherwise in response to criticism over comments on women’s health spending

Jeb Bush’s comment questioning whether a half of billion dollars was needed to cover women’s health issues opened the candidate up to criticism that he is “anti-woman” as he touted his pro-life record.

Following the controversial remark, the campaign immediately sought to clarify it, saying the candidate “misspoke” and that his comments referred specifically to defunding Planned Parenthood and not women’s health generally.

From the outset, Bush has aimed to run an inclusive campaign, casting himself as a “compassionate conservative” with the ability to broaden the party’s appeal.

But in Tallahassee, Bush, who declared himself “probably the most pro-life governor in modern times”, had a reputation as a deep-dyed conservative, especially on social issues, said Matt Corrigan, a professor of political science at the University of North Florida and author of Conservative Hurricane: How Jeb Bush remade Florida.

“Running as the party’s centrist alternative, he’s trying to have a more moderate tone, but his record as governor is very conservative so I think he’s battling between those,” Corrigan said. “Something like yesterday shows that it’s a difficult balance to strike.”

While governor, he signed into law state-issued “choose life” license plates, restricted late-term “partial-birth” abortions, and approved a parental notification law for minors seeking abortions.

Bush lobbied a judge to consider appointing a guardian to the fetus of a mentally handicapped woman who had been raped in group care. He also intervened in a case in an attempt to prevent a 13-year-old girl from having an abortion.

In 2001, he failed to veto a controversial measure, known as the Scarlet Letter law, that required women to publish their sexual histories in the newspaper before putting their babies up for adoption if they did not know the father’s identity. Bush later signed the repeal of the law, after a state court ruled it unconstitutional.

Though this wasn’t a measure Bush signed, he appeared to suggest that a lack of public shaming was responsible for an increase in out-of-wedlock births in his 1995 book, Profiles in Character, which was dredged up and reported on earlier in the campaign.

“One of the reasons more young women are giving birth out of wedlock and more young men are walking away from their paternal obligations is that there is no longer a stigma attached to this behavior, no reason to feel shame … There was a time when neighbors and communities would frown on out-of-wedlock births and when public condemnation was enough of a stimulus for one to be careful,” he wrote at the time.



Bush recently sought to clarify the passage, saying his views have “evolved” since he wrote the book two decades ago, and said the passage was intended to highlight the challenges children raised in single-parent households face.

Bush’s comments on Tuesday came while he was discussing the controversy surrounding Planned Parenthood during a Southern Baptist Convention in Nashville, Tennessee.

Earlier in the day, anti-abortion activists had released the latest in a series of secretly-taped videos in which representatives from the women’s health group discuss the sale of fetal tissue donated to science. However, the videos do not appear to show any unlawful conduct, as Planned Parenthood said it was only seeking reimbursements for the cost of processing and shipping tissues. Still, Bush agreed that the women’s health group should not receive federal funding.

The candidate’s views on Planned Parenthood have been scrutinized by Republicans as well, after a pro-life blog riled conservatives with a report that Bush had served on the board of Bloomberg Philanthropies when it donated tens of millions of dollars to the women’s health group.

In a statement to the Daily Caller, the campaign said he was not involved in the decision to allot money to Planned Parenthood and emphasized “Bush’s strong record of fostering a culture of life”.

The campaign reiterated on Tuesday Bush’s commitment to preserving life in response his remarks about funding women’s health. The release noted that during his tenure as governor, Bush had proposed a hotline that would direct women seeking to terminate their pregnancies to crisis centers opposed to abortion. The release also said he passed a law expanding treatment to women diagnosed with breast and cervical cancer and increased funding for breast cancer research by allowing state-issued “fight breast cancer” license plates.

With Democrats keen to promote the Republicans “war on women” narrative, Bush may be pushed to fine-tune how he uses his conservative record, careful to thread the needle by appealing to the party’s base without hurting his standing with women.

“Bush has a really strong socially conservative record in Florida,” Corrigan said. “It will be interesting to see how much he plays on that during this election, especially during the primary.”