Ben Carson on Sunday compared abortion to slavery, saying he’d like to see the Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade overturned so that the practice can be made illegal.
“Think about this. During slavery — and I know that’s one of those words you’re not supposed to say, but I’m saying it — 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 said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
“And, you know, what if the abolitionist had said, you know, ‘I don’t believe in slavery. I think it’s wrong. But you guys do whatever you want to do?'” he added. “Where would we be?”
Carson said he opposes abortion in nearly all instances — including in pregnancies resulting from rape and incest.
NBC host Chuck Todd asked Carson, “Whose right, I guess, should be superseded? The mother or the unborn child? Whose right, who has greater rights?”
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?”
Carson topples Trump in Iowa polls
Donald Trump on Friday knocked Ben Carson as weak on trade and immigration as he reacted to two new polls showing Carson overtaking the real estate mogul for first place in Iowa.
Trump told CNN’s Jake Tapper that he was “really surprised” to see his fortunes dipping in Iowa and said he is going to need “to work a little bit harder in Iowa” to win back support in the first-in-the-nation caucus state. Two polls released Thursday and Friday showed Trump slipping to second place in Iowa with 20% and 19% of support, respectively, while Carson surged to first place with 28% in both polls.
“I’ve done really well with the evangelicals and with the tea party and everything and I just don’t understand the number, but I accept the number,” Trump said. “It means I have to work a little bit harder in Iowa.”
While Trump has repeatedly emphasized that he is a “counter-puncher” and only attacks other candidates once they’ve attacked him, his assault on the retired neurosurgeon wasn’t a response to anything Carson has said about Trump. In fact, Carson has been one of the only candidates to pull his punches against Trump, repeatedly refusing to criticize the billionaire who maintains his lead in the national polls.
“I like Ben, but he cannot do with trade like I do,” Trump said. “He can’t do with a lot of things like I do, so we’ll just have to see what happens.”
He added that he worries that Carson is “just not going to be able to do deals with China, to be able to do deals with Japan.”
Trump’s business and deal-making experience are key planks of his candidacy.
Trump most fiercely criticized Carson on immigration, accusing him of supporting amnesty.
“He’s very, very weak on immigration and I’m very strong on immigration,” Trump said. “Ben Carson is very, very weak on immigration. He believes in amnesty strongly. He believes in citizenship. He’s going to give citizenship to people who are here illegally — you can’t do that.”
Carson supports giving undocumented immigrants guest worker status if they come forward and report their presence in the country.
He has repeatedly denied the characterization of his plan as amnesty, but has left the door open to those guest workers eventually becoming citizens.
“We have to recognize that we can’t just round them up, but we can give them an opportunity to register,” Carson said last month on CBS. “I would give them an opportunity to become guest workers — not citizens, not voting people, not people who get goodies. I think that would be a fair way to do it. In terms of them becoming citizens later on down the road if they’ve done things the right way, we the American people will decide what the criteria for that ought to be.”
