Just in case you had forgotten, the campaign web sites of Barack Obama and Mitt Romney want to remind you it's Mother's Day. The Obama site includes a card you can sign for the First Lady and a video of the President paying tribute to his mom and grandmother. Meanwhile, Team Romney is offering "Moms Drive the Economy" bumper stickers, Ann Romney's USA Today op-ed on "Three Seasons of Motherhood" and a gauzy video of Mitt's five sons praising their mother Ann.
But while Barack Obama proclaims "my mother was the single, most important influence in my life" on his web site, Lenore Romney doesn't appear to be featured at all. Which is too bad. After all, as the New York Times explained in February, "in style, temperament and outlook, Mitt Romney is very much his mother's son." Especially, it turns out, when it comes to Mitt's evolution - or more accurately, devolution - on the issue of abortion rights.
As the Times suggested, Lenore Romney was a trailblazer in her own way. Almost 50 years before her son announced that his wife Ann "reports to me regularly" what women voters care about, the Michigan First Lady championed their role in the political process:

In 1963, three decades before Hillary Rodham Clinton's infamous "I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas" remark, Mrs. Romney told Time magazine that as Michigan's first lady, she did not "expect to be a society leader holding a series of meaningless teas." By 1966, she was traveling the state asking audiences, "Why should women have any less say than men about the great decisions facing our nation?"

And when it came to women's reproductive rights, as Mitt would explain 24 years after her failed 1970 Senate campaign, the issue was a very personal one for mother and son alike.
As Salon's Justin Elliott documented in "The Abortion That Mitt Doesn't Talk About Anymore," it was his own family story which informed his pro-choice position during his 1994 Senate run against Ted Kennedy. When Kennedy labeled him "Multiple Choice Mitt," during their debate, Romney responded with a tale of personal loss:

"On the idea of 'multiple-choice,' I have to respond. I have my own beliefs, and those beliefs are very dear to me. One of them is that I do not impose my beliefs on other people. Many, many years ago, I had a dear, close family relative that was very close to me who passed away from an illegal abortion. It is since that time that my mother and my family have been committed to the belief that we can believe as we want, but we will not force our beliefs on others on that matter. And you will not see me wavering on that."

Running for Governor in 2002, Mitt Romney went to great lengths to reassure the pro-choice voters of Massachusetts that he was on their side. He even enlisted his wife Ann in the effort.

ANN ROMNEY: I think women also recognize that they want someone who is going to manage the state well. I think they may be more nervous about him on social issues. They shouldn't be, because he's going to be just fine. But the perception is that he won't be. That's an incorrect perception.
MITT ROMNEY: So when asked will I preserve and protect a woman's right to choose, I make an unequivocal answer: yes.

But voters who missed those Massachusetts campaigns wouldn't know of the existence of Ann Keenan, the sister of Romney's brother-in-law who died at the age of 21 in 1963 after a botched, illegal abortion. Of course, as this 2007 exchange with Tim Russert showed, Mitt Romney no longer wants you to know about her, either:

RUSSERT: You talked about your family relative who died from an illegal abortion, and yet President Romney is saying is saying ban all abortion. And what would be the legal consequences to people who participated in that procedure?... So back to your relative.
ROMNEY: Mm-hmm.

Romney went on to explain the consequences (loss of license and possible prison time for doctors, though not patients) of his new found anti-abortion views. But he never did get back to his relative.
As it turns out, Mitt Romney also threw his mother under the right-wing's anti-abortion bus. When Governor Romney was challenged in 2005 about his mother Lenore's supposedly pro-choice views, he went so far as to re-release her statement from her own 1970 Michigan Senate run. But as the Globe's Joan Vennochi pointed out four years ago:

In response to the column, Romney produced a statement of his mother's position at the time: "I support and recognize the need for more liberal abortion rights while affirming the legal and medical measures need to protect the unborn and pregnant woman." The statement is ambiguous and Romney never accounted for the ambiguity.

He hasn't talked much about his mother on the campaign trail since.
Tracing Mitt's turnabout on abortion, the New York Times on February 11, 2012 recounted that:

In 2005, Governor Romney shocked constituents by writing an opinion article in The Boston Globe that declared: "I am pro-life." Running for president two years later, he struggled to explain that turnabout. "I never said I was pro-choice, but my position was effectively pro-choice," Mr. Romney told George Stephanopoulos of ABC during a Republican debate. "I changed my position."

As it turns out, Mitt wasn't the first Romney to admit that change. As the Times pointed out in another article two weeks later:

On one issue -- abortion -- Mr. Romney has explicitly cited his mother's views as the basis for his own. During his 1994 race against Mr. Kennedy, and again in 2002 when he ran for governor of Massachusetts, he told voters that his mother personally opposed abortion but had taken "a very bold and courageous stand" in arguing that "a woman should have her own right to choose." He said he felt the same way...
But in 1972, two years after she lost, Mrs. Romney made her personal opposition clear, much as Mitt Romney eventually did after he was elected governor.
"I am not for destroying life," she told an interviewer then, describing her response when the question came up during speeches on college campuses. "And then I ask them, if later, they would want to kill all the old or abandoned people in the world."

Like mother, like son.
Now, Mitt Romney likes to talk about his father George, the former American Motors CEO and Michigan Governor whose life lessons and political defeats shaped his son's worldview and personal ambition. But to better understand Mitt Romney the candidate (as opposed to Mitt Romney the CEO), this Mother's Day voters might want to focus instead on his mom.