In chatting with Andrew Sullivan on Friday’s show, I had something of an epiphany regarding the Romney campaign, especially regarding Romney’s much-reported change of heart regarding abortion. According to the conventional media narrative, the story goes something like this: Mitt Romney was pro-choice and always had been pro-choice. Stunned by the creation of a Harvard program that planned on creating embryos, harvesting their stem cells, and then destroying the embryos, Romney suddenly had an awakening and became pro-life.

I don’t know where this narrative came from, but it’s wrong in a couple of critical aspects. Mitt Romney always thought abortion was wrong; he was never a pro-choice politician who thought abortion was a value-neutral exercise. The Road to Damascus experience that the Harvard program triggered concerned his support for Roe v. Wade and his sense that a woman’s right to choose trumped the state’s interest in protecting the fetus. I realize that some people may consider this a distinction without a difference; for others, it might mean something. It might even mean a lot.

YOU GOTTA REMEMBER, I was there in 1994 when Romney ran against Ted Kennedy in 1994. At the time, preserving a woman’s right to choose was a core part of his platform. I’m sure you’ve all seen the relevant You-Tube a few hundred times by now. In spite of his commitment to choice, Mitt Romney was still an unsatisfactory candidate for groups like Planned Parenthood and NARAL. Inquiring minds might want to know why.

In ’94, Romney ran afoul of the abortion rights lobby because the abortion rights lobby has always maintained that abortion is not a bad thing and Romney refused to agree with them on that key point. Groups like NARAL and Planned Parenthood bristle at the Clintonian line about abortion – “Safe, legal and rare” – because the “rare” part implies that there’s something wrong with abortion. In the eyes of NARAL, an abortion is no more a moral concern than a pedicure. And please note, I’m not even taking into account certain wackadoos (or perhaps I should say wackadettes) who think each abortion should trigger a celebration because it strikes a blow to a repressive patriarchy.

While Romney was pro-choice, he never told NARAL or Planned Parenthood what they wanted to hear regarding his views on the morality of abortion. His critics who think he’ll say anything to please might want to ponder this political moment. Romney paid a high price for this position which in terms of practical impact was purely symbolic and rhetorical. In the Fall of 1994, Ted Kennedy routinely derided Romney as “multiple choice Mitt” because Romney would not agree with the NARAL-mandated position on the morality of abortion.

When he ran for governor in 2002, Romney’s position infuriated the left even more. Unlike in 1994 when Romney ran a long shot campaign, in 2002 Romney had a really good chance. His position remained the same. His official stance was that he realized if elected, he would be representing a pro-choice state and thus would not limit a woman’s right to choose regardless of his personal feelings. That was pretty much his exact formulation. Once again, he refused to tell abortion proponents what they wanted to hear, and he again tasted their wrath.

SO WHAT HAPPENED AT HARVARD in 2005? The light bulb that went on for him in that Harvard lab had nothing to do with the morality of abortion. Romney always thought abortion was wrong, and was always clear enough on that point to earn the abortion lobby’s hostility. What changed was his attitude regarding public policy on abortion. When Romney entered that lab, he thought the Roe v. Wade-conferred woman’s right to choose was good policy. When he walked out of that lab, he felt differently. So, again, what exactly happened in that lab?

In that lab, Mitt Romney saw the results of 30+ years of ruinous social policy. The judicial legislating done by the Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade had run completely amuck. The “safe, legal and rare” formulation that the Democratic Party of the 1990’s had settled on had either been disingenuous or discarded. At America’s premiere academic institution, life would be created and then destroyed for the furtherance of science.

So Romney had a transformation on a matter of social policy. On the underlying issue regarding the morality of abortion, he didn’t move – he always believed abortion was wrong. What he saw was that the emphasis on a woman’s right to choose had driven our society in a horrifying direction. There had already been 30 million deaths. The future, given the further devaluation of life that the Harvard program represented, looked even worse.

I WOULDN’T LOOK FOR MITT to say the following on the campaign trail, but I would imagine he still sympathizes with a woman who wants her right to choose. But he has had an irrevocable and understandable change of heart – Society’s and the Supreme Court’s sympathy for that right has led us to a moral catastrophe.

He’s spoken about his transformation on the stump, and his campaign has dealt with the issue, but I think all their efforts in this regard have lacked sufficient clarity. The campaign’s goal has been to make sure voters realize that Mitt Romney is now pro-life and that he’s not at all squishy on the subject. From a campaigning perspective, this makes sense, but the narrative regarding what happened on his personal Road to Damascus got muddled somewhere along the way.

I also would be skeptical of a 50-something guy suddenly deciding that abortion was wrong. But that’s not at all what happened with Mitt Romney.

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