Mitt Romney in Peoria
Mitt Romney greeting supporters in Peoria, IL.
Photo Credit: Dave Davidson – Prezography.com

The October Surprise that some are predicting surrogates of President Barack Obama to roll out may in fact be good for Mitt Romney.  In fact it may likely energize his base which has viewed him with skepticism, especially over the life issue.

RadarOnline.com reports that liberal civil rights attorney and Obama surrogate, Gloria Allred, is attempting tomorrow morning to have a gag order lifted and unseal testimony that Mitt Romney gave during a case heard at the Norfolk Probate & Family Court in Canton, MA.  They say that Justice Jennifer Ulwick will oversee the hearing set for 9:00a.  Allred would not comment.

Steve Ertelt of LifeNews.com points to speculation surrounding Carrel Hilton Sheldon, a former Mormon, that Mitt Romney helped during his time as bishop of his local congregation.  Allegedly Romney helped Sheldon during a difficult pregnancy and tried to talk her out of having an abortion.

Ertelt said that liberal sites like AlterNet paint the story as a negative.  They write:

A far more ominous tale in the Romney canon also took place that summer, one that has been largely swept under the rug as the former governor of Massachusetts challenges incumbent Barack Obama for the presidency. There have been no songs written about it, no cartoons, no gags on late-night television, no magazine covers.

It was in August of that year, shortly after the Romney family returned from their vacation to Lake Huron, that a pregnant woman in her late 30s—Carrel Hilton Sheldon—was informed by her doctor that she had a life-threatening blood clot lodged in her pelvic region.

In treating the clot, Sheldon was administered an overdose of the blood thinner Heparin, an overdose that not only resulted in significant internal bleeding, but also extensive damage to her kidneys, to the point where she was on the verge of needing a transplant. Her life was clearly in peril.

Sheldon’s doctor advised her that the overdose of Heparin might have also harmed her 8-week-old fetus and, given the possible fatal repercussions to her, he recommended that she abort her pregnancy.

Sheldon, a mother of four at the time (a fifth child had died as an infant), was then a practicing member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS), outside of Boston. The LDS leader in Massachusetts at that time, called the “stake president,” was a Harvard-trained physician, Dr. Gordon Williams, and he counseled Sheldon to follow her doctor’s advice to terminate the pregnancy and protect her own life, so that she could continue caring for her four living children.

“Of course, you should have the abortion,” she recalled him saying.

According to an account later written anonymously by Sheldon for the LDS women’s journal,Exponent II, it was after receiving this counsel from her  Williams (sic) supporting the potentially life-saving procedure that she experienced an uninvited visit in her hospital from her Mormon bishop at the time, 36-year-old Mitt Romney, who adamantly opposed the abortion.

“He regaled me with stories of his sister and her retarded child and what a blessing the child had been to the family,” Sheldon wrote of the incident. “He told me that ‘as your bishop, my concern is with the child.’”

Pro-abortion advocates will try to paint Romney as extreme.  However if true this could also help him with his prolife base which have been skeptical about his prolife credentials.  Also this is far from extreme for anybody other than anti-religious bigots.  I know among evangelicals no pastor who would ever counsel a woman to abort her child.  I would suspect the same among Mormon bishops and elders as well.  I honestly don’t see how this could do anything but help him if it comes out.

She said all he cared about was the unborn “fetus” – somebody had to be concerned about the child because it didn’t seem like anybody else was.  Also having been a pastor I can attest that you always have naysayers and people who don’t like your ministry style.  It would seem to me that liberals are trying to highlight the one or two who didn’t care for him in order to paint a narrative which doesn’t seem accurate by most accounts I’ve read or heard, for instance this piece written by Nicolas Lemann for The New Yorker (hardly a conservative publication):

There are many stories of his pastoral activities: the time he rushed over to Doug Anderson’s home to help after a fire, the time he deployed a group of Bain Capital employees to go to New York to find Bob Gay’s missing teen-age daughter, the time he straightened out a wayward son of Kim Clark’s. If elected, Romney would arguably be the most actively religious President in American history.

Clayton Christensen told me about his days as a struggling young consultant. He is from a modest background in Utah, and had married and started a family while still a student, so when he bought his first house, in Belmont, he and his wife had to fix it up themselves, a process that took twelve years. One night, exhausted, he was on his hands and knees on the living-room floor applying polyurethane. There was a knock on the door; it was Mitt Romney, who explained that he had driven by just to check up earlier in the evening, and had seen Christensen through the living-room window. “There’s a better way to do it, Clay,” Romney said. “Here, let me show you.” He produced a tool that he had devised at home.

As he was telling me this story, Christensen (who once or twice had to wipe tears from his eyes when he was speaking about Romney’s church activities) got out a sheet of paper and drew a diagram of Romney’s solution. Romney had laid three four-inch paint brushes side by side, then fixed them to each other with duct tape, then attached the brushes to a pole—“so rather than being on my hands and knees, I was standing up, and applying the polyurethane with a wide brush. I was done in half an hour.”

Yeah
 such a cold-hearted person.

Update: I just read an article at The Blaze that gives more information about this story – which is over a year old and was reported in The New York Times.

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