Former President Donald Trump and right-wing commentator Mike Huckabee will campaign together in Pennsylvania on October 29. Huckabee has a long history of making extreme remarks about abortion: He declined to rule out using the military or law enforcement to stop abortion; compared abortion to slavery, mass shootings, 9/11, and the Holocaust; and supported a decision to deny an abortion to a 10-year-old after she was raped by her stepfather.
Huckabee is the former governor of Arkansas and a longtime political commentator who currently hosts a show on Trinity Broadcasting Network. Huckabee has said that Trump offered him a cabinet position when he was president but he wasn’t interested.
In 2015, while Huckabee was running for president himself, The Topeka Capital-Journal wrote that “Huckabee indicated Thursday that if elected, he wouldn’t rule out employing federal troops or the Federal Bureau of Investigation to stop abortion from taking place in the United States.”
Asked by another reporter how he would stop abortion, and whether this would mean using the FBI or federal forces to accomplish this, Huckabee replied: “We’ll see, if I get to be president.”
He said he would use all resources available to protect U.S. citizens.
Huckabee said past presidents also have defied Supreme Court rulings. He cited Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln, and said Lincoln had ignored the court’s 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford decision — which found that black Americans weren’t citizens — when he emancipated slaves. He didn’t clarify in what way Jefferson had violated any court rulings.
Controversy soon ensued. ABC News' George Stephanopolous later asked Huckabee if he would support “calling in law enforcement to prevent abortions.” Huckabee dodged the question.
Huckabee’s remarks are part of a larger anti-abortion record. Here are several other examples from the right-wing commentator.
Huckabee supports banning abortion nationwide. He has said that the federal government should ban abortion by invoking the 5th and 14th amendments, including stating that he’s praying “for the day when issue is personhood & we apply 5th and 14th amendments to ALL people from conception to natural death.” He has also specifically criticized the idea of states having their own abortion policies, saying: "For those of us for whom this is a moral question, you can't simply have 50 different versions of what's right.”
Huckabee opposed providing abortion to a 10-year-old who was raped by her stepfather. In 2015, Huckabee said he opposed allowing an abortion to a 10-year-old Paraguayan girl who was raped by her stepfather. (The girl eventually gave birth at 11.) He said: “A 10-year-old girl being raped is horrible. But does it solve a problem by taking the life of an innocent child? And that’s really the issue.”
Huckabee has repeatedly compared abortion to the Holocaust. In 2007, he said that “we have aborted more than a million people who would have been in our workforce had we not had the holocaust of liberalized abortion under a flawed Supreme Court ruling in 1973.” In 2013, he said that abortion is an “incredible Holocaust of our own in America.” And during a 2014 speech, Huckabee said: “If you felt something incredibly powerful at Auschwitz and Birkenau over the 11 million killed worldwide and the 1.5 million killed on those grounds, cannot we feel something extraordinary about 55 million murdered in our own country in the wombs of their mothers? Does that not speak to us?”
Huckabee compared abortion to 9/11 and mass shootings. During his show in January 2018, he said:
MIKE HUCKABEE (HOST): Since the barbaric and activist court of 1973 rendered that decision, 60 million unborn children died in what should have been the safest place on earth for a baby, its mother's womb. Now, let that sink in a minute. 60 million babies. When just under 3,000 people died on 9/11, it shocked us and it shook us. And when mass killings at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando or the Sandy Hook School, Las Vegas, or the Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, took the lives of people in the double digits, the news went 24/7 to give us every detail. But more than a million babies a year have been sliced to pieces, suctioned out of their mother like dust from a vacuum, and even burned alive with a chemical solution. And instead of outrage, many people defend this slaughter with euphemistic language like women's health and a woman's right to choose.
“Abortion is based on the logic of slavery”: Huckabee has repeatedly compared abortion to slavery. He has made the comparison between abortion and slavery repeatedly over the years. During his show in January 2018, for instance, he said: “No one I know defends slavery anymore. The assertion that one human being can actually own another human being and treat them like property, even determine if they should live or die, that's repulsive. But abortion is based on the logic of slavery, that some human beings are just not worth as much as others.”
Huckabee has claimed abortion is not reproductive health. In 2019, he said: “The lie is that abortion is necessary for reproductive health, and that's simply not true.”
Huckabee claimed women get abortion because of coercion. In 2023, Huckabee claimed that women who get abortions “probably got talked into the abortion by a boyfriend, a friend, a mother, a grandmother, maybe a father.”
