Michael Reagan's Pro Life Speech

By Jeralyn, Section Republican National Convention 2004
Posted on Wed Sep 01, 2004 at 06:17:53 PM EST
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Michael Reagan is turning his adoption into a pro-life platform. He says because Ron and Nancy and his adoptive mother and his birth mother were pro-life and pro-adoption, he is here today. He's making it sound like he was surrounded by love his entire life. He sure told a different story in his 1988 family tell-all, "On the Outside Looking In." Here's one account of the happy family from the book (Washington Post, 3/31/88)

...a two-career family, a divorce, third-party child care, a hated stepparent and a second family, sibling rivalry, teen-age rebellion, estrangement. Add emotional traumas from adoption and childhood molestation suffered by a man later branded the family troublemaker who capitalized on the family name, and accused of being a kleptomaniac, and you have Ronald Reagan's own family as seen through the eyes of his elder son.

Michael Reagan on his adoptive mother, Jane Wyman: (Newsweek 3/21/88):

"When are you going to stop living off your father's name? I can't believe you have anything to say at this time of your life that's worth reading." Michael Reagan, quoting his adoptive mother, Jane Wyman, after she learned he was writing a book about his life with her, Ronald Reagan and stepmother Nancy.

Washington Post: 2/17/89, on Barbara Bush visiting Neil Bush's newborn child:

It's a sharp contrast to the family life of former President and Nancy Reagan, who didn't see son Michael Reagan's daughter (coincidentally also named Ashley) until the child was 20 months old ...

On Michael Reagan's book:(Wash. Post, 5/22/88):

Michael Reagan, as he makes painfully clear, has played hurt for most of his 43 years, and there are still signs in his remarkably personal book of that boarding school kid stumbling to his feet, giving a slight shake to a dazed head and putting on a brave smile with a tentative little wave to the stands. Then, as now, the cheer he would most want to hear would come from his father, Ronald Reagan, with back-up hurrahs from his mother, actress Jane Wyman, and stepmother, Nancy Reagan.

"My childhood," he writes, "was spent seeking affection, trying to get my parents to put their arms around me and say, 'I love you.' " A few weeks before his father's second inauguration, the almost 40-year-old Michael seized a rare moment alone with his dad and confronted him: " 'You know, you've never told me that you love me.' " The president "looked surprised," he writes. "Then he said, 'Michael, I love you.' "

Perhaps a happy ending for Michael Reagan, but the famil