The Republican War on Women Intensifies
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Remember back in they day, when serious Republican presidential candidates would try to blur their unpopular views on reproductive freedom — focus on TRAP regulations and lies about “sending abortion back to the states”? Well, that’s over — their belief that women should be coerced to carry pregnancies to term under all circumstances is now out in the open:
Walker was given a chance to evade or repudiate his extreme position, perhaps by merely expressing support for the law he signed. In what is a credit to his integrity (although not his humanity), Walker held firm to his extremist position: “I believe that that is an unborn child that’s in need of protection out there, and I’ve said many a time that that unborn child can be protected, and there are many other alternatives that can also protect the life of that mother.”
It’s is almost impossible to overstate how radical and indefensible Walker’s position is. His argument that there are “alternatives” to abortion when a pregnancy is life-threatening is pure gibberish. The draconian bans common in the period before the supreme court’s 1973 decision in Roe v Wade almost always included an exemption for the life of the mother. (The Texas statute at issue in the case did.)
Even Catholic doctrine makes an exception for the life of the mother. And as Kelly observed, Walker’s position is massively unpopular, and for good reason: the idea that a woman should be coerced by the state to carry a pregnancy to term even at the risk of her life is the purest barbarism.
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If taken seriously, the idea that the fetus is a “person” under the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments would mean that a woman who obtained an abortion and a doctor who performed one would be guilty of first-degree murder in all 50 states and under federal law. If Huckabee doesn’t mean this, it’s not clear what he does mean, but it would certainly be nothing good for American women.
Granted, Mike Huckabee is not going to be the Republican candidate for president. But Marco Rubio might be, and he denied last week that he had ever supported a rape or incest exception to abortion laws. “What I have advocated is that we pass law in this country that says all human life at every stage of its development is worthy of protection,” he told the audience. “In fact, I think that law already exists. It is called the Constitution of the United States.”
If you think pregnancy being a state-enforced death sentence sounds awesome, you definitely want one of these gentlemen picking replacements for Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer. Otherwise, I would strongly recommend avoiding such a scenario.