“The View” host Sunny Hostin defended a Michigan political candidate Wednesday who is facing national criticism for believing unborn babies conceived in rape should be protected from abortion.
Hostin, the lone pro-life voice on the ABC talk show, said she knows people who were conceived in rape, and their lives are valuable, according to Decider.
“I have met people who were born after rape, and do you just abort the child because you were raped?” she said.
On the show Wednesday, the hosts discussed comments that Michigan gubernatorial candidate Garrett Soldano made about abortion in cases of rape.
Speaking on the podcast “Face the Facts” in January, Soldano said he opposes abortion even in cases of rape because “that little baby may be the next president.”
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“How about we start inspiring women in the culture to let them understand and know how heroic that they are?” he said of mothers who choose life for their babies after being raped. “And how unbelievable that they are? That God put them in this moment and they don’t know that that little baby inside them may be the next president, may be the next person who changes humanity?”
His comments quickly sparked outrage among abortion activists, pro-abortion politicians and celebrities, and he was shoved into the national news spotlight.
Hostin defended unborn babies’ rights on “The View,” telling co-host Joy Behar: “I’m not saying that I’m swayed by this argument, but it’s an argument I’ve made. People know my Catholic faith leads me to be pro-life and against abortion.”
She acknowledged that rape is a horrific act of violence against women, but unborn babies are not to blame.
“Rape is a horrible thing. I’ve prosecuted sex crimes for the majority of my career,” she said. “But I have met people who were born after rape, and do you just abort the child because you were raped?”
Hostin said the one situation that she struggles with is pregnancies resulting from incest.
“The mother can have problems delivering a baby [who is] the result of incest, and the child generally has problems,” she said.
Many victims of rape choose life for their unborn babies, and others who have abortions later said the abortion only compounded their trauma. For example, in 2015, a sexual abuse victim told a British court that her abuser forced her to abort her unborn baby. While the woman admitted that she had no desire to be a mother, she said she would not have aborted her baby – “because I didn’t want to go through all that.”
Despite the backlash, Soldano said he will not back down from defending unborn babies’ right to life.
He said he will “not be bullied by the media or the far left into backing down from my pro-life beliefs. I believe in the equality of all life and the value of life is not based upon the occasion of its conception, but the sacredness of its essence.”
