Presidential Candidate Mike Huckabee Is Totally OK With Forcing 10-Year-Old Rape Victims To Give Birth

Two weeks ago Republican Presidential candidate Scott Walker said that he was OK with letting a woman die rather than permitting her to have an abortion. But just before he clinched the title for most anti-abortion candidate in the GOP, Mike Huckabee has swooped in to say that he is actually OK with forcing 11-year-old rape victims to give birth.

According to Think Progress, on CNN’s State of the Union, Huckabee praised the decision of Paraguay to forbid an 11-year-old girl from getting an abortion, even though the girl became pregnant as a result of being raped by her stepfather when she was just 10 years old. The girl’s mother had tried to get an abortion for her daughter, but the state said the daughter was healthy, and thus must carry the fetus to term and give birth. The girl gave birth by C-section on Thursday, and my heart breaks for her and the baby.

But on State of the Union, Huckabee said that while he thought the rape of a 10-year-old girl is “horrible,” he was in favor of forcing that girl to stay pregnant and give birth.

“Does it solve the problem by taking the life of an innocent child?” Huckabee said.

While nothing could undo the trauma of rape, it certainly seems like preventing an 11-year-old from going through childbirth and having to have a child would certainly reduce the number of problems that 11-year-old has. But Huckabee even has the gall to say his position is in the 11-year-old’s best interest, because it prevents her from feeling guilty about the abortion, even though studies have shown that the vast majority of women who get abortions do not regret them.

The girl was forced to give birth because abortion is illegal in Paraguay, except for very rare cases where the government deems there to be sufficient risk to the mother’s life. Huckabee likes the Paraguay model, which is similar to what he would like enact if he were president. Huckabee, Mark Rubio, and the aforementioned Scott Walker have all said they would like to ban abortion even in cases of rape or incest. Walker, of course, would even ban it if the mother’s life were at risk.

These positions are horrifying, but at least there is comfort to be had in the fact that the vast majority of Americans do not support full abortion bans even for victims of rape and incest, so hopefully the candidates espousing them will fall out of the running sooner rather than later.

(Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)