Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson staked out a strong pro-life stance Sunday, casting his opposition to abortion as part of his legacy as a doctor.
“I have spent my life trying to save life, not trying to destroy it,” the famed neurosurgeon said on ABC’s “This Week” Sunday morning.
His response came to a question from ABC’s Martha Raddatz, who asked if he believed that there should be exceptions to abortion bans in the case of rape or incest.
“I believe that once conception has been achieved, that it is a human life,” Carson said, before proceeding to note his career as a doctor.
Carson, a candidate for the Republican nomination for president in 2016, previously led a highly distinguished career in medicine, becoming the director of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital.
On Sunday he also argued that Planned Parenthood, the abortion provider mired in controversy because of undercover videos showing its employees discussing reimbursement for providing fetal parts to researchers, was an organization with racist roots.
“You have to go back to the beginnings of Planned Parenthood and [founder] Margaret Sanger, who was a great believer in eugenics, who believed that certain people were like weeds that needed to be controlled,” said Carson, who is black.
Carson asserted that Planned Parenthood puts the majority of their clinics in minority neighborhoods.
“Margaret Sanger believed that certain people, including blacks, were inferior and that the way you strengthened the society is you get rid of them,” he said, referring to the founder of Planned Parenthood.
