The way Chris Christie tells it on the campaign trail, after he heard the heartbeat of his second child during an early-stage ultrasound in 1995, he had a pro-life/forced-birther conversion, reports Matt Friedman.

"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."

Okay, you can put the tissues away now. Turns out the timeline doesn't quite add up. A year later, he was still calling himself "pro-choice" on the record even as he supported so-called “partial-birth” abortion bans.

“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.”

Also, what about that first child, born in 1993? Apparently, not so inspirational.

Early last year, Daily Beast writer Olivia Nuzzi also highlighted the newspaper quotes and questioned why the heartbeat of Christie’s first child, born two years earlier, “did not inspire a similar kind of soul-searching.”

Ouch. In the same article, Nuzzi offered an alternative explanation to Christie’s tear-jerker.

It’s worth considering that around the time Christie had his epiphany, he was badly losing a Republican primary for the state assembly to a staunchly pro-life conservative named Michael Patrick Carroll.

Yes, that’s worth considering.