The funny thing about the 13 primary debates that the Republicans have held so far is that it has taken so many for us to learn anything. During his post-debate show last Thursday, Sean Hannity admitted to Mitt Romney that he hadn’t realized — until the former governor said so in this very last debate before the Iowa caucuses — that during the governor’s time in office, the Massachusetts legislature was “85 percent Democrat.” (Not to mention the fact that, frequently, the Republicans weren’t very good allies.) If that was news to a professional politics-watcher, then you can bet (how does $10,000 sound?) that Sean is not alone. And the information about the Massachusetts legislature is important, because it gives us a more accurate picture of Romney’s record, and sheds light on both the compromises he made and those he refused to make.

That last debate before Iowa was also the first time in this campaign that Romney told the story not only of his pro-life conversion, but of the radicalism that forced the issue.

“With regard to abortion, I had the experience of coming into office, running for governor saying, I’m going to keep the laws as they exist in the state,” he said. “They were pro-choice laws, so effectively I was pro-choice. Then I had a bill come to my desk that didn’t just keep the laws as they were but would have created new embryos for the purpose of destroying them. I studied it in some depth and concluded I simply could not sign on to take human life. I vetoed that bill. I described to them why I am pro-life.”

This was in 2005. The impetus for the bill came when the Harvard Stem Cell Institute announced plans to clone human embryos for research. The president of the Massachusetts state senate, Robert E. Travaglini, promptly introduced a bill to, in his words, “send a clear message that we are going to authorize this kind of research.”

Supporters of Harvard’s plans were making wild claims about the benefits of embryonic-stem-cell research, as people were wont to do back then. (Remember John Edwards’s snake-oil claim that Christopher Reeve would not have died if we had permitted federal funding of such research?) But, rather than buying into the hype, Romney became a student of the issue and came to the conclusion that, as he put it at the time, “whether you’re personally pro-life or pro-choice, we should be able to agree on ethical boundaries that should not be crossed when it comes to cloning human life for experimentation.”

The New Atlantis, a bioethical/technical journal, described Romney’s approach thus: “[It] would still permit (but not endorse or fund) the use of embryos left over from reproductive IVF procedures, but not the creation of new human embryos (either by cloning or IVF) simply to destroy them for their cells. The Romney initiative was a direct challenge to Harvard, which already engages in the creation of embryos for research and destruction and stands poised to approve research cloning.”

The embryonic-stem-cell/cloning issue has seen more than its share of emotion, confusion, and manipulation. A 2006 Missouri ballot initiative tried to enshrine in the state constitution a right to produce and destroy human clones, even while claiming to ban the practice. Advocates of this radical, dehumanizing research desperately sought government funding, having found that smart businessmen wouldn’t make the risky investments. (Just this fall, in fact, the company that had been at the forefront of embryo-destroying research abandoned it.)

For Romney, the issue hit close to home. He told the New York Times at the time: “My wife has M.S., and we would love for there to be a cure for her disease and for the diseases of others. But there is an ethical boundary that should not be crossed.”

When Romney first approached conservative audiences with his conversion story, there was skepticism, a skepticism that dogs him to this day. But the way he talked about the destruction of human embryos in 2007 describes very well where we are as a people: “The Roe v. Wade mentality has so cheapened the value of human life that rational people saw human life as mere research material to be used, then destroyed. . . . [But] what some see as a mere clump of cells is actually a human life. Human life has identity. Human life has the capacity to love and be loved. Human life has a profound dignity, undiminished by age or infirmity.”

I don’t know which candidate will survive the Republican primary process. But we ignore at our peril existential questions about who we are and where we are going. And whether or not you fully believe Romney’s conversion story, his words in the last debate of 2011 present us with a challenge to do as he did.

Romney had a complicated — and controversial, given the ethical and scientific fog amid which the issue was presented — decision to make back in 2005, and he took it seriously. We should do the same and be more rigorous when it comes to issues of human dignity and justice. We need to make sure that, in all the broad characterizations and rapid media bombardments, we don’t miss the full picture, both as we evaluate candidates and as we make intimate, challenging, even painful choices in our personal lives. Mitt Romney’s conversion story presents an opportunity and a model. We must ask ourselves: What exactly are we doing to human life in the name of reproductive health, assisted reproductive technology, and plain old let’s-just-see-what-we-get laboratory research by curious scientists? In 2005, a governor and husband showed us how to answer.

— Kathryn Jean Lopez is the editor-at-large of National Review Online. This column is available exclusively through United Media.