This week at UMASS Lowell, Ed Markey and Stephen Lynch faced off to make the case to voters about who would be the best next US Senator from Massachusetts. When it came to questions on choice, Congressman Lynch mumbled and jumbled his response.
We want to make it clear for all Massachusetts voters: Congressman Lynch is anti-choice.
Lynch’s voting record speaks for itself. Every year at NARAL we grade our legislators based on their voting record on Choice. In 7 years out of the last 11, Lynch has scored less than a 50%. Lynch has, on multiple occasions, voted to deny women in the military the right to use their private health insurance for abortion care. He voted in support of the infamous Stupak Amendment which would have, in effect, banned private insurance companies from providing abortion coverage for women. He also voted against Health Reform which, as we all know, now gives women unprecedented access to birth control and lifesaving preventative screenings that keep women healthy.
Congressman Lynch pretends that he is pro-choice by trying to create gray areas where it’s actually very black and white: Stephen Lynch has repeatedly voted against a woman’s right to choose.
Congressman Ed Markey, on the other hand, has had a nearly perfect pro-choice voting record for the last three decades. He has stood with women in their right to make personal, private decisions with their doctors. “This issue is one that is intensely personal,” Markey said in his recent interview with the Boston Globe. “I made the decision 30 years ago that I could not and should not impose my religious beliefs on others. And my record since then reflects that.”
NARAL Pro-Choice America has endorsed Ed Markey. Planned Parenthood has endorsed Ed Markey. There is no question that Ed Markey is pro-choice. Stephen Lynch has some nerve trying to imply that Markey isn’t pro-choice. Unlike a vote Markey took in 1973, the votes Stephen Lynch takes today actually impact women’s lives here and now.
Women’s access to reproductive health services is under unprecedented attack across the nation. That is why we are asking you to join us in this final month to elect the next Pro Choice Senator from Massachusetts. Massachusetts cannot send an anti-choice US Senator to Washington—think of the message that sends to the rest of the country. Ed Markey will stand with women, and we need all the allies we can get right now.
Join NARAL Pro-Choice in the final weekends of April as we help to elect Ed Markey to the United States Senate. Sign up today!
Ed Markey would not be a Congressman today if he had not been the Pro-Life candidate in a wide Democratic Primary field when he first ran for Congress. That’s how he won the niche primary with a minority of votes (20+%) but enough to take the prize. After elected when he had to face Pro-Choice candidates one-on-one, no crowded field to save him, he had an epiphany and switched positions. I’m glad he switched but I know why he switched and it had little to do with strong pro-choice philosophy. Ed is no saint and Lynch is no devil.
I have watched both of their ads…questions: If Ed Markey has been fighting for equal pay for women for over 30 years, why hasn’t he made so little progress on the issue? If Ed Markey has been fighting for gun control for 30 years, why has he made so little progress on the issue?…not saying Lynch did much better, but Lynch isn’t claiming that he did.
is to get your rep to support your position. I believe there have been enough votes since 1973 to establish the position both Markey and DINO Lynch hold, and I am fine with supporting a current progressive who may not have been a progressive 40 years ago. I know where they both stand now, and the DINO has done everything in his power to drive me away from supporting him. Even though he is my current congressman, I will never support the DINO Lynch and 40 year old votes do not impress me at all. The stench of desperation from the DINO is too much, IMHO. 21 days to GOTV.
…that Markey is one of 535 members of Congress at any given time. He said at the debate there was no epiphany, but rather evolution. Maybe it was politically convenient at the time, but Lynch is a lot more recent and even now it seems not quite there.
My God. Whatever he did in the 1970s, and whatever the reasons for the shift, Markey has voted the right way for more than 30 years. Lynch cannot say he’s held this position for even 30 weeks. Their records on choice speak for themselves. Or do you think NARAL and PP don’t know who’s been on their side and who, say, voted for Stupak just a couple of years ago?
That this “argument” continues to arise on this site, and in every debate between these candidates, is pure silliness.
1. My positions have sucked, but the other guy used to suck in 1976. The 30+ years in between his “evolution” and mine count for nothing.
2. The other guy’s been trying to get equal pay and gun control. We’re not there yet. So he’s failed. I haven’t failed, because I haven’t tried. Vote for me.
Thanks for the laugh, fenway, on this gray morning. This comment cracked me up. Spot. On.
I guess his commitment to advancing women’s rights explains the motivation for all those junkets he’s so proud of.
I sincerely respect Ed Markey’s position on abortion, like me, he was raised in an Irish Catholic household and taught to value all life even the unborn. The thing is, that’s the church’s definition, and in the US we cannot enforce our religious views on others. What we can do, and what Ed has done for over 30 years, is make sure abortion is safe, legal, and rare. There are Democrats for Life and they are sincere. Sen. Casey is one of them. I can respectfully disagree with him on that issue, and the sole “anti-abortion” bill he has advanced is the Pregnant Women Support Act, which would both reduce abortions as well as providing socialized paternity and maternity care for that purpose.
Lynch has done nothing on that issue. He hasn’t backed Casey’s bill, hasn’t backed anything that could actually help women exercise their right to choose and make it easier for them to choose life. What he has done, is voted repeatedly to take away that right to choose. The worst one is that he has opposed these rights even for service women fighting to uphold the Constitution, which has enshrined their right to choose. Lynch has opposed that.
Instead he has voted for every symbolic,useless, and offensive right wing piece of demagoguery on this issue and done nothing positive to reduce the need for abortion. At all. And now he has just disavowed all the shameless right wing garbage since Massachusetts doesn’t like that shit on a statewide level. So no, Ed Markey is the only principled candidate on abortion. I could tolerate a sincerely pro-life Lynch, someone willing to back policies that help women and make them less likely to abort, but he hasn’t done that. He has never cared about women, he has only cared about the socially conservative voters in his district. Lets send him back to Southie, don’t send him to the Senate.
…I have yet to hear an explanation from Lynch on his vote for that execrable nonsense known as the Terri Schiavo bill.
Does Lynch really want the voters to go back and compare what he and Markey were doing 35 years ago? I don’t think it would cast Lynch in a very good light…