Planned Parenthood slams Mitt Romney in major ad buy

For only the third time ever, the Planned Parenthood Action Fund has endorsed a presidential candidate, Barack Obama. It previously has endorsed Obama and Bill Clinton. It is backing its support with a 30-second spot declaring Republican Mitt Romney's positions to be "out of touch" with women's needs and "harmful" to their health. The organization will spend $1.4 million to show the ad in the battleground states of Virginia, Iowa and Florida, as well as the District of Columbia.

This is just the first round of ads from Planned Parenthood in this election cycle. The ad will run through June 19 on broadcast and cable.

'President Obama understands the health and economic challenges women face'and has fought to address them by expanding health care for women, including access to birth control without co-pays and preventive care including cancer screenings; fighting for equal pay for women; and standing up to protect a woman's ability to make her own personal medical decisions,' the group said.

Given how many fury-generating Romney comments there are to choose from regarding women's health and reproductive rights, the inclusion of his unwillingness to talk about his views on paycheck fairness seems a bit out of place in the ad. But it does show one more reason why the candidate is plagued by a huge gender gap and shows PPAF taking a healthy step beyond one-issue campaigns.

'This is just the beginning,' Dawn Laguens, the group's executive vice president, [told The New York Times]. 'This is a very small down payment on what we intend to do to make sure people are very clear where the candidates stand.'

'Mitt Romney has been much clearer and more direct even than John McCain in his interest in dismantling women's health care,' Ms. Laguens said. 'The threats have intensified. The Republican primary laid bare and made clear what their agenda is.'

Romney's present stand came into sharp focus during a primary campaign in which he worked hard to persuade Republicans in the right-most social agenda-oriented sections of the party that he would work for their objectives. But as Kaili Joy Gray points out, some of those Republicans, hard-core Planned Parenthood foes, still worry about where Romney really stands because of his pro-choice statements in the past. Unlike the candidate himself, they aren't afflicted by Romnesia.

Geoff Garin, PPAF's pollster said that focus groups that totaled 500 women in key states indicated that they did not know how extreme Romney's current views regarding women's rights are. He said the Planned Parenthood ad had "jaw-dropping" effects on its audiences.