During an appearance on MSNBC Thursday morning, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee (R) tore into Republican frontrunner Donald Trump’s assertion—and then walk-back—that women should be punished for having an abortion if the procedure was outlawed.
Huckabee, whose daughter recently joined the Trump campaign as an adviser, characterized Trump’s abortion remarks as “a mess-up.” But he also defended Trump’s transformation on the issue of abortion as genuine.
“He wasn’t prepared for it,” Huckabee said on “Morning Joe.” “It’s clear he had not thought through that whole idea of do you punish the woman, and of course you don’t.”
Huckabee said anti-abortion advocates have “never said” punishment should be given out to those who have had an abortion. He then pivoted to a defense of Trump’s anti-abortion bona fides.
“Now, let me be very clear, if you listen to his answer about being pro-life and the transformation that he made from being very pro-choice to pro-life, I’ve heard it publicly and I’ve heard it privately in an intimate moment with him and I believe that is his sincere understanding as he faced this in a more personal level rather than philosophical,” he said.
Host Joe Scarborough pressed Huckabee about the likelihood of such a transformation. “What light blinded him? Because I’ve never seen that happen,” Scarborough said.
“I don’t think he was prepared. I don’t think he saw that one coming. He handled it poorly,” Huckabee replied. “He had to walk it back and issue a statement to clarify and correct. He did. Look, it was a terrible answer.”
“Nobody’s going to defend what he said because the idea of we’ve got to have some punishment and in his answer it looked like he was fumbling around,” he added. “Let’s be — let’s just lay that on the table. It was a mess-up. But to say he hasn’t thought through the abortion issue, I think that’s a stretch. Surely he had not thought through that specific question of whether or not you should enter some type of legal consequence against the woman, and he should have thought it through. That was a mistake of Donald Trump. It was a mistake of his staff.”
Watch below via MSNBC:
A Duggar moment???
Well I’m confused. If you’re for executing murderers and you think abortion is murder, why wouldn’t you be for executing the worthless subhuman sluts who have abortions? Or is it just that you don’t think admitting you believe that is politically expedient? Or could it possibly be that your premises are intellectually insupportable and that makes you haz a sad?
I’ve honestly never thought of that question before either but just assumed that anybody opposed to abortion on these “moral principles” would see the woman as a murderer and thus she should be treated as one. Truly very interesting and eye-opening for me.
That has been the illogical underpinning of the anti-abortion movement for a long, long time. I have contacted a few anti-abortion orgs on-line and offered them donations if they could answer the question of why the woman (and perhaps partner, too) receiving an abortion should not be prosecuted in the world they want that criminalizes the procedure. Never got a response. Their workaround for rape, incest and life of the mother is dubious, too. Further proof that the anti-abortion movement is mostly a political one, not moral.
Why not?
The only answer is that banning abortion is about punishing women for having sex, and it has nothing to do with fetal life.