Apparently, suggesting a grown man can enter and use the bathroom stall right next to a young girl wasn’t the only provocative thing Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump had to say during his town hall-style appearance Thursday on NBC’s Today program.
The businessman—who claims to have converted from a pro-choice to a pro-life position on the issue in 2011—has always suggested there should be exceptions to any ban. Those include pregnancies that result from rape or incest, as well as elective abortions to provide for the health of the mother.
But his position isn’t aligned with the Republican Party’s platform. The platform states, “We assert the sanctity of human life and affirm that the unborn child has a fundamental individual right to life which cannot be infringed.”
“The Republican platform every four years has a provision that states that the right of the unborn child should not be infringed,” co-host Savannah Guthrie said. “And it makes no exceptions for rape, for incest, for the life of the mother. Would you want to change the Republican platform to include the exceptions that you have?”
“Yes, I would. Yes, I would. Absolutely,” Trump said. “For the three exceptions, I would. I would leave it for the life of the mother, but I would absolutely have the three exceptions.”
Live Action founder Lila Rose didn’t take his words sitting down. In a post written on the Live Action website, she made one thing abundantly clear: You can’t be pro-life and support aborting babies for any reason:
Rape and incest are horrific injustices, and those who commit these acts should always be punished to the full extent of the law. U.S. law forbids the use of the death penalty as a punishment for rapists, yet current law permits killing the innocent preborn children conceived in rape. Abortion should not be held up as a pathway to healing from rape or incest, as it doesn’t undo the crime; it just adds more violence to what the survivor has already endured.
If you are pro-life, you can’t say certain lives are less worthy or don’t deserve protection because of how they are conceived. To say children conceived in rape are somehow less human and shouldn’t be allowed to live is a grave injustice. Survivors of rape and incest and their children must be shown compassion and be supported by their communities. While some mothers choose to keep their children, adoption is the option for those who don’t.
Over 1,000 medical professionals from around the world have publicly declared that abortion is never medically necessary to save a mother’s life. While life-saving medical treatment may result in the death of the child in a mother’s womb, there is a fundamental difference between providing that legitimate treatment and elective abortion.
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