Shades of Richard Mourdock and “what God intended”!
Among the many other retrograde positions he has taken, Ben Carson wants the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade and criminalize all abortions. As Ed Brayton reported at Dispatches from the Culture Wars,
Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson said on Sunday that believes Roe v. Wade should be overturned, and that women should not be allowed to have abortions even in the case of rape or incest.
“The mother should not believe that the baby is her enemy and should not be looking to terminate the baby,” Carson opined to NBC host Chuck Todd. “We’ve allowed purveyors of division to think that baby is their enemy and they have a right to kill it. Can you see how perverted that line of thinking is?”
There are a number of possible responses to this latest evidence of Carson’s worldview: the most rational is to simply shrug. Ben Carson isn’t going to be President of the U.S.–despite his current lead in GOP polls, he isn’t even going to be the Republican nominee, so the fact that he wants to make women carry their rapist’s baby to term–however creepy or nauseating one might find that–is ultimately irrelevant.
On the other hand, Carson is hardly the only Republican who sees “God’s will” in the consequences of a rape. Mourdock and Akin were the most high-profile, but there are plenty of others–almost all of them men– who want to deny women not just the right to abort, but access to birth control as well. (After all, if you give us the right to control our own reproduction, we’re likely to get all uppity and start thinking we’re equal to men.)
I don’t really expect this latest pronouncement to damage Carson’s popularity with the GOP fringe. After all, if stating that racism wasn’t a problem before Obama’s election, that Muslims should not be allowed to be President, that evolution is a “Satanic plot,” that we need to get rid of Medicare and Medicaid, and that university professors should be monitored and censored only operated to endear him to the party base, this latest evidence of bizarre reasoning is unlikely to offend them.
What’s a little misogyny among Republicans?
Those who usually oppose government regulation WANT more government regulation when it comes to women’s very personal reproductive health and choices. If we want abortion – legal or otherwise – to be more rare, then emergency and other healthy contraceptive choices should be available to every woman who wants and needs it.
The overwhelming majority of Protestants, Catholics and Jews support contraception. While Catholic church doctrine does not, that’s no reason for government to adopt one church’s doctrine, especially when it would increase the abortions they oppose.
If you give the state the power to tell you what you cannot do with your body, you have given the state the power to someday change its laws and tell you what you will do with your body.
It’s not a woman’s right to choose when it comes to terminating a pregnancy. Who speaks for the rights of the unborn child she obviously does not want? A society that cannot protect its most vulnerable members is what is “creepy and nauseating”. And just who is denying women access to birth control? Put on your big girl panties, walk into CVS, and buy a pack of condoms.