It’s unusual for Republicans to find themselves on the defensive on abortion. | AP Photos GOP tripped up by new abortion fight

Republicans have been taking ground in the war on abortion for years, putting Democrats on the defensive on specifics like “partial-birth” abortion and parental rights.

But suddenly the GOP has fallen into a similar trap, bedeviled by details: rape, invasive ultrasounds and the merits of contraception.


Todd Akin’s “legitimate rape” remark forced fellow Republicans to publicly explore the details of how they think about abortion — details that don’t serve their broader argument and that give Democrats a chance to reframe the debate, conservatives say. That’s not going away any time soon: Akin reaffirmed in a Friday press conference that he won’t be dropping out of the Missouri Senate race.

( Also on POLITICO: GOP platform lists anti-abortion proposals)

He has proved that it only takes a moment — a word — for a single player to hijack the cause. Republican officials say there’s a lesson to be learned: The message and the messenger matter.

“When we get into the details, I don’t think it’s ever more inclusive of people,” Jackie Curtiss, a 22-year-old Republican National Committee member from Alabama told POLITICO in a telephone interview from Tampa. “I’m a Republican. I’m pro-life. … [but] if I was raped or my best friend was raped, I would hope we would have a chance to make the decision of whether to keep the child. That would be our decision, not the government’s, not the party’s.”

Curtiss was turned back in an attempt to strike a plank from the anti-abortion portion of the party’s platform that opposes FDA approval of drugs that would terminate pregnancies after the point of conception. She said she also was disappointed that the party didn’t respond to Akin’s remarks by approving exceptions to the anti-abortion policy in rape and other extreme cases.

It’s unusual for Republicans to find themselves on the defensive on abortion, as public opinion polling has shown a sharp increase in the percentage of Americans who consider themselves “pro-life” — from 33 percent in 1995 to 50 percent this year, according to Gallup — and a concomitant drop-off in the percentage who view themselves as “pro-choice.”

But this isn’t the first time this year that an effort to limit abortion — or contraception — has become a liability for the GOP.

In May, Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell retreated from a state plan to require women seeking abortions to first have invasive ultrasounds. And earlier this year, House Republican leaders fumbled away a winning religious-liberty argument on the president’s contraception rules when House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) blocked the testimony of Georgetown University law student Sandra Fluke at a hearing on the matter.

“Sometimes they are on to something right — both policy right and politics right — and end up getting sidetracked,” Jennifer Rubin, a conservative Washington Post columnist, said.

Rubin took social conservative leaders to task Thursday for not pushing Akin to leave the race.

The latest incident has put the party in a particularly tricky spot because the Missouri congressman and Senate candidate’s policy prescriptions on abortion line up closely with those of freshly minted GOP vice-presidential candidate Paul Ryan. They also pointed to serious divisions within the party over whether opposition to abortion should be absolute or allow for exceptions in cases of rape, incest and endangerment to the life of the mother.

The party’s presidential nominee, Mitt Romney, believes in exceptions that aren’t included in the party’s platform.

The wind at the back of the Akin story: The Republican National Convention’s platform writers this week codified their quadrennial call for outlawing abortion without mention of exceptions.

Some Republican politicians and pundits recognize that the amplification of the views of the party’s hardest-core social conservatives can cost them precious ground with moderates in their own party and independents — even those who agree with them on the basic principle of combating abortions.

In February 2011, after Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.) introduced a bill to curtail federal subsidies for abortion that narrowed the standard rape exception to “forcible rape,” fellow Republicans pushed him to drop the word “forcible.” Akin and Ryan were both cosponsors of the original bill.

After taking national criticism, McDonnell watered down the ultrasound bill to allow women to opt out of a trans-vaginal procedure by electing to undergo an external abdominal ultrasound.

And Akin found himself on the receiving end of withering criticism from within his own party. As a withdrawal deadline fast approached earlier this week, Senate Republicans and the deep-pocketed outside group Crossroads threatened to cut off the supply of money to his race.

President Barack Obama and Ryan delivered the same message on the matter: “Rape is rape,” they said. Ryan called Akin personally to ask him to drop out of the race — to no avail.

Ron Nehring, a consultant and former chairman of the California GOP, said Democrats are on the lookout for opportunities to steer the debate away from abortion and toward issues like contraception.

“Republicans have to be smart in how they discuss these issues lest they make themselves vulnerable” to Democratic efforts to characterize — and mischaracterize — their positions, he said.

It’s a strange position for Republicans to find themselves in. They have made progress over the years in building public and political support for anti-abortion positions, including efforts to ban a procedure that opponents call “partial-birth” abortion and parental notification laws.

But they have shown “a knack for snatching defeat out of the jaws of victory,” Rubin said.

Not everyone agrees that there’s a problem.

“Republicans are tripping? No. One accidental candidate, Akin, belly-flopped on rape, and no one can figure out why, including, it appears, him,” GOP strategist Mary Matalin said, adding that she believes Democrats failed to make the case that Republicans are waging a “War on Women.”

“The presumption that all women are as obsessed with their ‘reproductive rights’ is retro, liberal tripe. Women are concerned about their jobs — or lack thereof, their bills, their families, the nation’s debt, the ‘new normal’ —where the value of everything they planned on has gone down and the cost of everything they live on day to day has gone up,” she said. “In short, women are way more concerned about the kids they have, or hope to have, than the ones they may or may not abort.”

Not long ago, it was Democrats who couldn’t find solid ground on the outskirts of the abortion debate.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi acted as Solomon for Democrats during the discussion of Obama’s healthcare law in late 2009 and again in early 2010, saving the measure from a rift over its implications for abortion. She engaged in shuttle diplomacy at one point, going back and forth between a group of socially conservative Catholic lawmakers and her base of liberal abortion-rights supporters to craft a compromise that kept the bill alive.

In the hours before the final vote, she picked off enough anti-abortion Democrats to ensure enactment of the law, even as their longtime Republican allies on the issue accused them of selling out.

Earlier this year, Democrats seemed headed for another divisive fight when the Health and Human Services Department developed a regulation for the new law that would have required religiously affiliated institutions to cover contraception for their employees.

Republicans and some Democrats, including Vice President Joe Biden, criticized the proposal, and Obama fashioned what the White House termed a compromise, in which the equation was flipped to require insurers to cover the institutions’ employees for free.

The GOP turned the winning political issue into a loser when Issa refused to let Fluke testify.

Fluke had hoped to talk about a friend who lost an ovary when she couldn’t get contraceptives that might have treated her illness. Issa ruled that she was unqualified to testify because the hearing was about religious liberty, not contraception.

Democratic women on the committee walked out, and Fluke, who now has a speaking slot at the Democratic National Convention, became a media darling.

Earlier in the year, Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum voiced his belief that states should have the right to ban contraceptives.

Rep. Jack Kingston (R-Ga.),an opponent of abortion, said politicians like Akin get in trouble when they go beyond their depth in discussing related issues.

“The easy solution to that is don’t engage in the minutiae, which is what Santorum did and what Akin attempted to do,” Kingston said.

There are only a few pols at any given time who are well-versed enough to delve into complicated debates, he said, pointing to former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) as someone who had a handle on the ins and outs of stem-cell research.

“If you wanted to go out there with a position like Bill Frist and talk about gametes and zygotes, you need to know what the heck you’re talking about,” Kingston said. “There wasn’t room for pseudoscience in that debate, and if you want to get into abortion, you have to be philosophically well-vetted.”

Democrats, of course, hope that Akin will stick to Ryan and GOP presidential hopeful Mitt Romney.

In an interview with The Washington Post, Pelosi, no stranger to being a weight on her party in an election year, called Akin’s comment “the doggie doo on the shoe of his party, the tattoo on Paul Ryan that they won’t be able to get off.”

But Kingston said that the GOP ticket moved quickly enough to shun Akin.

“He was a pretty obscure guy until Monday,” Kingston said. “If Romney and Ryan were trying to explain it, that would be a different matter.”

Curtiss wanted to see her party include specific exceptions to its anti-abortion platform in light of the Akin controversy.

“It didn’t happen this week, but we’ve started a conversation, and we’re going to get more realistic about these social issues in the years coming up,” she said.

This article first appeared on POLITICO Pro at 7:03 p.m. on August 24, 2012.