Last night Herman Cain, running for nomination for the Republican Presidential ticket sat down with Piers Morgan of CNN – during the discussion, the topic of abortion was brought up.
Here’s the full, un-edited section of the interview where Morgan asks Herman about abortion:
Cain, who has touted himself as pro-life, reiterated this in the interview when he stated,
“I believe that life begins at conception. And abortion under no circumstances.”
Morgan then brought up the rape/incest question which was where Cain started to back-track. Note that The below comments were made explicitly in reference to cases where a woman has conceived through rape. Emphases mine,
“No, it comes down to it’s not the government’s role or anybody else’s role to make that decision. Secondly, if you look at the statistical incidents, you’re not talking about that big a number. So what I’m saying is it ultimately gets down to a choice that that family or that mother has to make.
Not me as president, not some politician, not a bureaucrat. It gets down to that family. And whatever they decide, they decide. I shouldn’t have to tell them what decision to make for such a sensitive issue.”
Cain tells us that he is against abortion in all circumstances – but that nobody, including the Government has the right to prevent the abortion of a rape-conceived baby. The question is, what is it about abortion that makes Cain think that it is unacceptable?
Then today, Cain stated that his comments on CNN had been misconstrued, and subsequently released a statement in which he proceeded to misconstrue his own comments from the night before,
“Yesterday in an interview with Piers Morgan on CNN, I was asked questions about abortion policy and the role of the President. I understood the thrust of the question to ask whether that I, as president, would simply “order” people to not seek an abortion.
My answer was focused on the role of the President. The President has no constitutional authority to order any such action by anyone. That was the point I was trying to convey. As to my political policy view on abortion, I am 100 percent pro-life. End of story.”
I’m going to go ahead and call this what it is – an out and out lie. Cain’s spin team has attempted to re-write Morgan’s question regarding the rape/incest exception, however it is blatantly false.
No matter how you try to spin it, Morgan was not asking whether Cain thought the president had the authority to order mothers to not have abortions. Likewise, Cain’s response was not – as he said, “focused” on his role as the President. In fact his answer focused on the following parties, in this order:
- government
- anybody else
- family
- the mother herself
- president
- politician
- bureaucrat
It is clear that Cain’s answer was not focused on the president’s role in ruling on abortion in cases of rape/incest. Instead his answer was all-encompassing: an answer which any pro-choice advocate would be proud of.
The question here is not, “is abortion in cases of abortion/incest acceptable.” Rather the question is, can Herman Cain who wants to become President, be trusted to defend life – or to do anything else he has said he will do?
I would strongly support a president who would push to end abortion except in cases of rape/incest – it’s not perfect, but it would be a lot better than any recent presidents. However I could not support a man who lies and distorts his message to the point that we just don’t have a clear idea of where he stands on abortion at all.
I question seriously the change that Herman Cain represents:
Will Herman Cain reverse America’s non-stop movement toward Collectivism when he has historically proven himself a collectivist? Remember that he supported the TARP bailouts, a.k.a. the trillion dollar fleecing of America.
Will he drastically reduce the size of the bloated tyrannical Federal monstrosity by eliminating entire unConstitutional Agencies? He has not expressed any intent to do so.
Will Cain get rid of the unConstitutional unPatriotic “Patriot Act” that blatantly violates America’s founding principles. Cain says that this tyrannical piece of legislation is “90% right on”. No way, pal.
Will he drive out his former employers, the private banking Federal Reserve globalists that built the United Nations and are driving America toward one world government tyranny? He has expressed that we don’t even need to audit, let alone drive these bloodsucking vampires from our shores. Puh-leeze!
Cain has been actively involved in the North American Competitiveness Council, a think tank for promoting the agenda of the Security and Prosperity Agreement that George Bush signed with Canada and Mexico which gives up America’s sovereignty and erases the borders with those countries by establishing the North American Union (NAU) and has also reportedly attended the secretive Bilderberg group meetings.
In an interview with Wolf Blitzer, Cain stated that he was pro-2nd Amendment, but that it should be up to the states. What does that mean?
In the final analysis, Herman Cain is clearly a collectivist and a globalist, just like Obama, Bush and the Clintons and these collectivist-globalist politicians are ruining America. I cannot consider him a serious candidate for any office, let alone President of the United States of America.
Re: Herman Cain,
I’m one of the most steadfast Personhood advocates here, I didn’t vote for McCain because he wasn’t pro-life, and I’m a huge skeptic of GOP politicians. But I can prove without a doubt that Herman Cain’s statements were not only pro-life, but even consistent with Personhood. He never made a mistake, he never made a misstatement — we just understood his words differently from how he meant them (which is still partly his fault, but still…)
The following points reference this video interview with John Stossel where it seems Cain is contradicting himself over and over, but he’s not if you’re paying attention.
When Cain says government shouldn’t make “that decision,” he’s actually agreeing with pro-lifers like myself and Alan Keyes (who wrote a WND article about this) that government has NO AUTHORITY to abrogate the inalienable rights of unborn children to life. Therefore, government shouldn’t be involved in a decision about which they have no authority.
A “decision” assumes they have some standing to decide policy. Cain is saying exactly what we’re saying — these are inalienable rights, which must be guaranteed by the government, but about which the government has no say and no standing to make policy.
Stossel and that other guest were dumbfounded, as was Keyes and the rest of us, because we were so surprised to see someone say on national TV that it’s not up to the government to decide what our rights are — our rights were given by our Creator and cannot be taken away. We understand that, but Stossel doesn’t, so he had no context from which to understand what Cain was saying.
At first glance, it looks like he was contradicting himself, but if so he did so repeatedly and completely, several times. No one does that. In reality, he wasn’t contradicting himself.
When he said, “No, people shouldn’t be just free to abort,” as well as other times when he asserted that abortion should not be legal, period, Cain is expressing a pro-Personhood sentiment.
When he said women have a choice to abort, he’s saying they can choose to break the law. How do we know that’s what he meant?
Because look at the exchange about drugs — mind-altering drugs are already illegal, but when the other guest suggests he and Stossel should have the choice to get high, Cain says they already do. How can that be possible if drugs are illegal? Only if he’s saying they have a choice to break the law.
So I believe Cain’s problem is not one of knowing where he stands on abortion — it’s one of communicating clearly what that stand is, in a way that the general public (and even us!) cannot misunderstand.
I’ll credit Bill Fortenberry of Personhood Alabama for realizing this before I did. His article is also worth reading: http://www.personhoodinitiative.com/herman-cain.html