Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee defended his call in Thursday’s Republican presidential debate to grant constitutional rights to fetuses and left the door open to use law enforcement to prevent abortions.
That “means that you guarantee due process under the Fifth Amendment before you deprive someone of their life and liberty; it means, under the 14th Amendment, there’s equal protection under the law,” Huckabee explained on ABC’s “This Week” Sunday.
“Exactly how that plays out is one of the ways we discover: What does it take for Americans to finally wake up to the fact that we are violating the constitutional rights of human beings?” he asked.
In “the past, presidents have employed many different ways to make sure that” constitutional rights are being upheld, he said, alluding to the deployment of the National Guard to enforce desegregation.
“We can’t keep defending the loss of 60 million human lives over the past 42 years,” he said. “And even the politicians who pretend that they’re not really for it — they’re personally against it — they’ll say things like ‘let’s keep it safe, legal and rare.’ It’s not safe.”
“I don’t think it’s legal,” Huckabee continued. “I think it violates the Fifth and 14th Amendment rights of an unborn person. And it certainly isn’t rare; it happens 4,000 times a day. That’s hardly rare.”
