'Birtherism' And Akin Dominate Pre-Convention Talk Shows [VIDEOS]

Sunday morning's talk show circuit featured a particularly matronly streak, with abortion, birth and Mother Nature dominating most of the punditry's attention.

The talk shows rolled into the day amid the continuing fallout over U.S. Rep. Todd Akin's "legitimate rape" comment and Mitt Romney's allusion to his "birth certificate" in a campaign speech.

Romney headlined a line-up otherwise immersed in the looming GOP convention, with an interview on "Fox News Sunday" with Chris Wallace. Following the Akin controversy, Democrats have tried to portray Romney and more broadly the GOP as anti-woman, an accusation which the former Massachusetts governor vehemently denied.

"In regards to women's health care: Look, I'm the guy who was able to get health care for all the women and men in my state," Romney said. "They're just talking about at the federal level, we actually did something and we did it without cutting Medicare and without raising taxes."

The defense is somewhat problematic for Romney, but may be among the first times he stood behind a previous policy that is politically dicey. His state-level health care reform set the blueprint for what would eventually become derisively called "Obamacare."

The GOP standard bearer also weighed in on the abortion controversy, calling Akin's verbal diarrhea "uninformed, outrageous and offensive."

"And in regards to the issue of abortion, that is something where men and women have alternative views on that or different views," he said. "We look at an issue like that with great seriousness and sobriety and recognize that different people have reached different conclusions. But it's not just men who think one way, women also in many cases are pro-life. There are two lives at stake: the unborn child and the mom, and I care for both of them."

Romney waded into the murky waters of the "birther" movement during a campaign stop in Michigan yesterday.

"I love being home, in this place where Ann and I were raised," he said. "Where both of us were born [...] No one's ever asked to see my birth certificate. They know that this is the place that we were born and raised."

The comment, which Romney quickly dismissed as a "joke," brought up the persistent belief among some Obama-haters that the president was, in fact, born in Kenya and the birth certificate he provided to prove otherwise is a fraud. "Birthers" have largely been dismissed even within the GOP, having been caricatured accidentally by Donald Trump -- who ran a single-issue non-campaign against the president by railing over and over about Obama's birth certificate.

Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus made rounds on the Sunday morning circuit, facing a battery of questions. Among the first: Did Romney mean it as a joke? Or has some latent birtherism reared its head?

"I think it's a nothing," Priebus told Candy Crowley on CNN's State of the Union. "The fact is that Mitt Romney - myself, from the moment that I became chairman - consistently Gov. Romney has said that this is a non-starter, Barack Obama was born in Hawaii."