page_title: Ann Romney
section_title: Role in 2008 presidential campaign
hierarchical_section_title: Ann Romney / Role in 2008 presidential campaign
caption_attribution_description: Republican Presidential Candidate Mitt Romney and his wife, Ann Romney
context_page_description: Ann Lois Romney is an American equestrian, author, and philanthropist. She is the wife of businessman and politician, Senator Mitt Romney of Utah. From 2003 to 2007, Romney was First Lady of Massachusetts, while her husband served as Governor.
  She was raised in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, and attended the private Kingswood School there, where she dated Mitt Romney. She converted to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in 1966. She attended Brigham Young University, married Mitt Romney in 1969, and in 1975 received a Bachelor of Arts degree in French.
  As First Lady of Massachusetts, Romney served as the governor's liaison for federal faith-based initiatives. She was involved in a number of children's charities, including Operation Kids. She was an active participant in her husband's U.S. presidential campaigns in 2008 and again in 2012, when he was the Republican Party nominee.
  Romney was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1998 and has credited a mixture of mainstream and alternative treatments with giving her a lifestyle mostly without limitations.
context_section_description: Ann Romney was an active participant in her husband's 2008 presidential campaign.  One past issue that arose involving her was disclosure of her donation of $150 to Planned Parenthood in 1994, when her husband was a pro-choice candidate for the U.S. Senate.   She said she did not remember the contribution; her own public stance on abortion has evolved in a similar manner to his, and by this time she was co-chair of the capital campaign for Massachusetts Citizens for Life. By late 2007, she had become an integral part of his campaign, and was doing more trips and appearances on her own, despite the risk that added stress would aggravate her condition.
  Her political message was often mixed with discussions of her family, her recipes, or managing her affliction. Romney's television advertisements in the early primary states prominently featured her  and by the close of 2007, she was the most visible of all the Republican candidates' wives in campaigning.  Regarding having to witness criticism of her husband, she later acknowledged that she sometimes wanted to "come out of my seat and clock somebody [but] you learn to just take a deep breath."  By the time he ended his campaign in February 2008, she had become openly distasteful of the whole process.
caption: Ann Romney with her husband, at a campaign stop in Altoona, Iowa, on December 29, 2007
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