GOP presidential hopeful Ben Carson is comparing yet another public policy he rejects to slavery. This time, it’s a woman’s right to have an abortion.
The retired neurosurgeon told NBC’s Chuck Todd Sunday that abortion should be outlawed, with almost no exceptions—equating women who abort their pregnancies to “slave owners,” the Washington Post reports.
“During slavery … a lot of the slave owners thought that they had the right to do whatever they wanted to that slave, anything that they chose to do,” Carson stated.
He continued: “And what if the abolitionists had said, ‘You know, I don’t believe in slavery. I think it’s wrong, but you guys do whatever you want to do’? Where would we be?”
The interview on Carson’s public-policy positions turned to abortion when Todd asked if life began at conception. Carson said it does, so Todd posed a question about whose right should be superseded—“the mother or the unborn child”?
Carson responded, “In the ideal situation, the mother should not believe that the baby is her enemy and should not be looking to terminate the baby. You know, things are set up in such a way that the person in the world who has the greatest interest in protecting the baby is the mother. We’ve allowed the purveyors of the vision to make mothers think that that baby is their enemy and that they have a right to kill it. Can you see how perverted that line of thinking is?”
The presidential candidate wants to see Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court’s 1973 decision that legalized abortion, overturned. In Carson’s vision, there would be no exception for rape or incest. He said that he would, however, consider an exception in the “extraordinarily rare situation” when a pregnancy puts the mother’s life at risk.
Carson has a history of comparing policies he dislikes to slavery. Back in 2013, he said, “You know Obamacare is really, I think, the worst thing that has happened in this nation since slavery.”
Read more at the Washington Post.