‘That’s her choice, that is not government’s choice’

Steve Benen notes that Herman Cain “may not know what ‘pro-life’ means” — or at least may not understand what most anti-abortion voters mean by that term.

If the Republican presidential candidate doesn’t believe the government should interfere with personal decisions on “sensitive issues,” Cain may think he’s “pro-life,” but opponents of abortion rights are going to draw a very different conclusion.

Benen is responding to these comments Cain made last night during an interview with CNN’s Piers Morgan:

[I]t 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. …

I can have an opinion on an issue without it being a directive on the nation. The government shouldn’t be trying to tell people everything to do, especially when it comes to social decisions that they need to make.

As Paul Waldman notes at Tapped, that means “Herman Cain Is Pro-Choice“:

This position—I’m personally opposed, but it’s not the government’s right to dictate—has been the position of many a Democratic politician for decades. But a Republican running for president? Holy cow.

I’ll wager that at some point in the next 48 hours, Herman Cain will issue a statement affirming that he didn’t actually mean what everyone thought he meant, and in fact he wants Roe v. Wade overturned and abortion made illegal in most or all circumstances, just like every other Republican candidate. Just you wait.

But as Benjy Sarlin reports for Talking Points Memo, this confusion on Cain’s position has been going on for quite a while:

Cain, then a lower tier candidate, baffled FOX’s John Stossel in an interview several months ago on abortion when he said “I don’t believe government should make that decision” and that if a woman is raped it’s “her choice” whether to end the pregnancy. But in the same one minute span he said that abortion should be banned in all cases. “I’m pro life, period,” he said.

On Meet The Press last week, Cain repeated that he does not believe in exceptions for abortion, but when asked a hypothetical scenario about a woman whose health is in danger replied “That family is going to have to make that decision.”

All three reports are correct that Cain’s repeated use of phrases like “it’s not the government’s role or anybody else’s role to make that decision” and “I don’t believe government should make that decision” won’t please the leaders of the political organizations seeking to criminalize abortion. They’ll see that as “pro-choice” language because that’s what it is.

But I don’t think Herman Cain is unique or even unusual in holding contradictory and self-negating views on this subject. This video ends with Cain declaring that his position is “real clear,” but his position is anything but clear as he toggles back and forth between saying, “I don’t think that government should make that decision” and “that’s her choice, that is not government’s choice” and saying “abortion should not be legal.”

Fox News host John Stossel is perplexed, and rightly so. But Cain’s rapid-fire contradictions and his failure even to realize that he is contradicting himself reminds me of the results of a poll earlier this year from the Public Religion Research Institute. The poll found that 29 percent of white evangelical Protestants believed that abortion ought to be legal, but also that 37 percent of white evangelical Protestants believed that abortion should be available in their local community. Hmmm.

Cain’s confusion is also very similar to the confusion seen in this video, in which anti-abortion protesters who advocate making abortion illegal seem completely thrown by the question of whether women who would have such illegal abortions ought to be legally penalized. His position may not make sense, but he’s not alone.