Thompson, as a lobbyist, took abortion rights assignment

A spokesman for the presidential hopeful denies he did the work, a claim an ex-colleague calls "bizarre."
By Michael Finnegan
LA Times

Former Tennessee Sen. Fred D. Thompson, who is campaigning for president as a "pro-life" Republican, accepted a lobbying assignment from a family-planning group to persuade the first Bush White House to ease a controversial abortion restriction, according to a 1991 document and five people familiar with the matter.

A spokesman for the former senator denied that Thompson did the lobbying work. But minutes of a 1991 board meeting of the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Assn. show that the group hired Thompson that year.

For the record -- A headline on an earlier version of this story said former Sen. Fred Thompson had accepted an anti-abortion lobbying assignment. The assignment was to lobby against a restriction on abortion counseling.

His task was to urge the administration of President George H.W. Bush to withdraw or relax a rule that barred abortion counseling at clinics that receive federal money, according to the records and the five people who worked on the matter.

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