Craig Silverman Show, Ellen Roberts, July 25, 2015
Station: KNUS, 710 AM
Show: Craig Silverman Show
Guests: Roberts
Link: http://craigsilverman.podbean.com/
Date: July 25, 2015
Topics: Birth Control, Pro-Life, Pro-Choice, Long Acting Reversible Contraception (LARC), Dan Caplis,
HOST CRAIG SILVERMAN: Ellen Roberts has thought long and hard about this issue. She went to law school, she studied Roe vs. Wade. She’s a mother herself and it comes up as she serves in the legislature. And, uh, we’ve replenished your hot tea with lemon and gotten you some more Irish whiskey, that might help you talk about these things, Ellen Roberts, because it’s not easy to talk about. And you had an occasion to have a conversation with Dan Caplis in which your words came out and weren’t necessarily well-received by all the Republican Party. What do you think as I play that call of the week and you remember your conversation with Dan Caplis? [Silence] Ellen? Are you there? Oh, no!
GOP STATE SENATOR ELLEN ROBERTS: Yes! I’m here! I’m here. I’m here, sorry. [inaudible] So, here’s what I think. I think there’s two different things going on. One is: What does pro-choice mean? And so, when Dan Caplis — when I was on Dan’s show, um, I — he came with the, “So you call yourself pro-choice.” Here’s where I got myself into trouble, is, as a young woman —young woman, and growing on up, and I’m in my later fifties, now — I thought I was pro-choice in the sense that I didn’t want abortion completely outlawed. And that is because I think women need to be able to make their own decisions, obviously not in a vacuum. They need to be supported by their family, by whomever they got pregnant by, their faith, their community. That needs to be a decision that the woman is supported in, no matter what her age is. But I didn’t feel like government should be the one to say what the woman had to chose, which is no abortion. I stopped calling myself pro-choice when I became a politician, not to play a game, but because those who identify as hardcore pro-choice started to say to me, based on some of my votes, that, “No, you’re not pro-choice enough.” And I thought, “Okay, well, the pro-life people, such as Dan, would say that I would never fit in their category.” I had primaries over the social issues, and people would say, “No, you’re not pro-life enough.” So then the pro-choice people said, “You’re not pro-choice enough.” So, I stopped trying to use any label, because I was like, “Put me in box number three.” Because I am more in the middle of the road, but I’m very —I feel like those of us in the middle are not squishy people who can’t make up our mind. We see more nuance, than maybe some on either end of the spectrum. Maybe we’ve had family or friends, or maybe somebody actually has had the personal experience of having to make those difficult choices of how to move forward. So, I feel very principled, myself. I did, in 2011, in a spirited defense of a Republican resolution on religious liberty, as I tried to talk to my Senate colleagues on the Democratic side of the aisle, I did refer to myself as pro-choice.
[…]
…“It was the one time, I think, that I slipped and said that.”
…“Well, I would have supported the LARC bill if it had come to the Senate floor, and that was something that the left skewered me on.”
