Rick Santorum, one of the presidential candidates for the GOP, has explained his opposition to abortion even in the case of rape. He said that women who face these circumstances should “make the best out of a bad situation.”
Santorum went as far as saying that he would help counsel his own daughter should she come to him with such a problem and counsel her to “accept this horribly created” baby, as it is still a gift from God.
“Well, you can make the argument that if she doesn’t have this baby, if she kills her child, that that, too, could ruin her life. And this is not an easy choice, I understand that. As horrible as the way that that son or daughter and son was created, it still is her child. And whether she has that child or she doesn’t, it will always be her child, and she will always know that,” Santorum said.
“And so to embrace her and to love her and to support her and get her through this very difficult time, I’ve always, you know, I believe and I think the right approach is to accept this horribly created — in the sense of rape — but nevertheless a gift in a very broken way, the gift of human life, and accept what God has given to you. As you know, we have to, in lots of different aspects of our life we have horrible things happen. I can’t think of anything more horrible, but nevertheless, we have to make the best out of a bad situation and I would make the argument that that is making the best.”
During Santorum’s run as a legislator and a presidential hopeful, he has campaigned against abortion. As a senator, he has had an obsessive tendency to discuss abortion topics on the Senate floor according to a recent analysis.
Santorum recently called President Barack Obama’s support of women’s reproductive rights “radical and extreme.”
Other advocates against abortion have discussed their views on the topic much like Santorum has in the past. A Tea Party-backed Nevada Senate candidate, Sharron Angle, explained her beliefs about abortion back in 2010. She said that abortions were unacceptable even in cases of girls being raped by their fathers.
“I think that two wrongs don’t make a right,” she said. “And I have been in the situation of counseling young girls, not 13 but 15, who have had very at-risk, difficult pregnancies. And my counsel was to look for some alternatives, which they did. And they found that they had made what was really a lemon situation into lemonade.”