If you want Mike Huckabee, the poster-boy of the evangelical community who won the Iowa caucuses in 2008, to approve of your candidacy, then you have to prove your anti-abortion bona fides. Of course, touting an extreme anti-abortion position in Iowa could come back to haunt the eventual nominee in the general election.
Wednesday night, Huckabee will host four Republican candidates at the screening of his new anti-abortion film, Gift of Life, a documentary-style film produced with Citizens United. Newt Gingrich will attend alongside Rick Santorum, Michele Bachmann, and Rick Perry. Though the former Arkansas governor-turned Fox News personality says he won’t be making an endorsement soon, his praise will go a long way in Iowa, where the field is still wide open and the caucuses only 20 days away.
“Even though I wasn’t running for president this year,” Huckabee said on his show, “I wanted to vote for someone who would fight to protect” children both “before and after they were born.”
Huckabee is about as far right as you can go on abortion. A vocal supporter of the ‘personhood movement,’ which believes a human being is created at fertilization, Huckabee is against any exceptions to anti-abortion laws, including if the pregnant woman’s life is at risk. Like Huckabee, the far right has increasingly embraced extreme anti-abortion positions, putting the two frontrunners in a tight spot.
The abortion issue is a sticky one for every politician — but Republicans who try to woo Huckabee could end up in hot water in the general election. Romney is a good example. Though he won’t be at the forum tonight, Huckabee asked him his view on the personhood idea in October, and Romney said he would favor a state-level personhood amendment. After Mississippi rejected such an amendment in November, Romney was left to explain his position that wouldn’t even pass muster in a very conservative state.
Gingrich has buckled to pressure to tack right on abortion as well. Despite a strong anti-abortion record, Newt recently felt the need to also embrace the ‘life begins at conception’ camp. In a statement last Saturday, he recanted a previous stance that life begins at ‘implantation’ and moved the goalpost up to fertilization. It may seem like splitting hairs - and when it comes to the legality of abortion, it makes no difference - but conception is code for being against forms of stem-cell research, some fertility treatments, and some popular forms of contraception. This contradicts his support of rape, incest, and life-of-mother exceptions.
As polls begin to show Gingrich slipping, he could turn to social issues to try to shore up any flagging support from evangelicals who are less convinced that Newt is their guy. They tend to agree with Huckabee when he says even though the economy and jobs are center stage, “treating every life with worth and dignity is still essential in selecting a leader.”
Pema Levy
Pema Levy is a News Writer at TPM covering the 2012 election. Before coming to TPM, Pema was an assistant editor at The American Prospect where she wrote about politics and the economy.
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