Mike Huckabee has staked out the most extreme position on abortion that I’ve ever seen from a presidential candidate in my lifetime. He has openly embraced the personhood movement, an extreme offshoot of the pro-life movement that seeks to have fetuses legally declared “persons” within the context of the Fifth and 14th Amendments. If this movement got its way, many forms of birth control could be made illegal, and women could potentially face criminal charges for having miscarriages.
We already know how strongly Huckabee feels about this–he has let it be known that if he were president, he wouldn’t rule out having the FBI and/or National Guard raid abortion clinics. But we got another idea of just how out there Huckabee is earlier this morning, when he declared on national television that if it were up to him, sexual assault victims wouldn’t be able to get an abortion–not even if they were children.
On CNN’s “State of the Union,” Dana Bash asked Huckabee about his view of a tragic situation in Paraguay. As I mentioned this spring, a 10-year-old girl was brutally raped by her stepfather and ended up pregnant. However, Paraguay’s ultra-strict abortion laws ban abortion unless the mother’s life is in danger. The girl, now 11, gave birth late last week. But that didn’t seem to bother Huckabee. Watch here.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XUMV4hoabYY&w=853&h=480]
When I first saw Crooks and Liars catch this, I thought it was snark. But unfortunately, it isn’t. Huckabee conceded that “a 10-year-old girl being raped is horrible.” But then he asked–with a straight face–“Does it solve a problem by taking the life of an innocent child?” He claimed that if you end the pregnancy that came as the result of rape or incest, you’d be discounting “the possibilities that exist” for that child. As an example, he cited televangelist James Robison, who was conceived as the result of his mother being raped and whose organization now cares for “hundreds of thousands of people across the world.”
Bash didn’t let this go unanswered. She pointed out that “the flip side” would be that we’d effectively be telling a 10-year-old girl, “You had this horrible thing happen to you, and you’re going to have to carry it out for the next nine months.” Huckabee replied–again, with a straight face–that while what happened to that girl was “anything other than a terrible tragedy,” letting that girl have an abortion under those circumstances would “compound the tragedy.”
With apologies to Politifact, Huckabee isn’t just wrong on this, he’s Pants on Fire wrong. Medical opinion is virtually unanimous that it is far too dangerous to risk letting a woman younger than 13 years old to have a baby, and that girls as young as 15 risk having severe complications if they become mothers. But even without this to consider, it is horribly degrading to tell a woman who has been the victim of rape or incest that if she ends up having a baby, she has to keep it. I believed that even when I was weakly pro-life, and I believe it now. Whenever you don’t allow a woman the option of an abortion when she gets pregnant under such degrading circumstances, as far as I’m concerned you’re degrading her all over again.
Then again, it isn’t all that surprising that Huckabee has taken such an extreme position. It’s not just because he has openly embraced the personhood movement. If Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the Susan B. Anthony List, is to be believed, a number of supposedly “mainstream” pro-life outfits consider exceptions for rape and incest to be a “political judgment” that is necessary to get restrictions on abortion passed into law. Wrong! Wrong! Wrong! This isn’t a political judgment–it’s basic decency.
It cannot be repeated enough–a major party presidential candidate has gone on record as saying that he’d be willing to tell a little girl who got pregnant as the result of a sexual assault, “You suffered a tragedy–but you still have to keep your baby.” I don’t have the words to express how obscene this is.
