This according to wikipedia
Isn’t that pretty extreme, even for an evangelical baptist pastor?
Does he have even a chance to be elected as the president candidate for the Rep with these believes? 
It might be more extreme, but it is more consistent. I don’t see why more people don’t take that position, as if they truly believed a fetus is a human life, the fact a crime was commited in the creation of it doesn’t mean its victim has the right to end a life not her own.
There is also what a difference between what one might counsel as a pastor and what one would enact as a politician. Even Falwell admitted that, much as he opposed abortion in any case but to save the mother’s life, a ban on abortion would not pass without a rape/incest exception.
It’s old news. And what Ludovic said.
You have a point there, but there is again that problem between theory and practice
how should you practise such a strickt abortion-law?
Wkiipedia
“…In one 1996 case, the abortion clinic that performed an abortion on a 15-year-old Arkansas girl who was allegedly raped by her stepfather was denied Medicare reimbursement by Huckabee.”
How many such cases would we have - and similar cases? - and what should the punishment be for those who had an abortion
While I have no reason to doubt that Huckabee has expressed the beliefs mentioned in the Wikipedia article, the nature of Wikipedia makes it a weak citation on controversial issues.
The views you cited are not extreme for an evangelical pastor. They may be too extreme for him to get the nomination unless he is able to credibly differentiate between his personal religious views and political opinions and how he would govern.
Oh, good! I’ve been waiting for the perfect thread to share a horrifying (to me) statistic I read last month in my husband’s Notre Dame Magazine! They did a survey of their alumni of the Class of '57; 300 of the 425 people contacted responded, and when questioned about abortion, the results (as reported on page 48 of the Autumn 2007 issue)
Now, of course, this is a select group of people: old, white, and Catholic, for the most part. But it does show me that lots of living breathing, college educated, eligible-to-vote people are strictly anti-abortion, EVEN in the case of rape or incest.
Yah, but he also stated: “He believes that it would “most certainly” be a good day for America if Roe v. Wade were repealed.”
this is more than just his personal believes
There are anti-abortionists who argue “Why should person C be killed for what person B did to person A? Should people already born be killed if it is discovered they were conceived by rape?”
Because C is not a person
Can someone explain why a pro-life person should be willing to permit abortion in the the case of incest?
Its consistent with their scientific disinformation, the common opinion is that chidren of very close relatives are invariably and/or very, very likely to be scaly mutants.
Well, since a fetus is obviously not a person, the only reason anti-abortionists could possibly have for opposing it at any point in the pregnancy is rabid misogyny! That, at least, is the pro-abortion side to the argument.
On the other hand, I don’t really see how allowing abortion other than for the life of the mother is consistent with believing the fetus is actually an alive human, and if you don’t believe that then I don’t see the reason for supporting penalties for it beyond those in place for cruelty to animals.
From Huckabee’s interview recently on Meet the Press:
So it would seem that his position is that the doctor would lose his license or something like that. No prison, though. That would make one wonder how strongly such a person really held the belief that abortion was the deliberate taking of a human life.
Isn’t that really the domain of another thread, or maybe the 9345 we’ve already had? This is about why a politician is running on such an extreme sounding position. IMHO, it’s because it’s not as extreme as we think; he’s not alienating as many voters with his stance as the OP thinks.
Well, a politician being honest about a controversial issue that may hinder his chances of election…isn’t that refreshing?
I prefer it, consistency-wise, than those who say “it’s terrible and I hate it, but I want to make it available without limitation”.
Please, let’s not turn this into yet another abortion debate. It’s about Huckster.
I agree
If pro-lifers, that seriously mean that an abortion is like taking a human life, then abortion of a fetus should be treated a murder one
According to polls, only 20% of registered voters in the US hold that view (assuming he’d be OK with abortion if the life of the mother was at stake). Scroll down to the CBS poll, Oct 12-17. He’s “alienating” 80% of the electorate with that view.
There is a consistent way of doing it, but it concedes a lot to the pro-choice position. Allowing abortion in the case of rape and incest shifts focus from the fetus’s right to life to the following question: Does the fetus have the right to use the mother’s body for continued survival, given that she didn’t consent to its presence in the first place? (Presumably, voluntary intercourse is some kind of implied consent.) But this shifts the debate from a right to life debate to a right to bodily autonomy for women debate, which is not where the pro-lifers want the debate to be (and which is exactly where many pro-choicers want the debate to be).
But it’s so much fun arguing about abortion!
Okay, fine. Reference my previous post as background. If you think the debate should be understood purely in terms of the right to life of the fetus (and reject the re-casting of the debate in terms of the mother’s right not to sustain a person where she did not consent to use her body to sustain that person), then yes, it is absolutely inconsistent to make exceptions for rape and incest. Nobody (on this reasoning) should die simply because of the manner of their conception, because the manner of their conception doesn’t affect their right to life (though it might affect whether the mother has given consent to use her body to sustain the person–but again, that’s another debate). So in fact, although I find Huckabee’s position abhorrent, at least he’s not a big pussy who is willing to embrace logical contradictions when it is politically expedient to do so.