December 7, 2019 (LifeSiteNews) – Democrat presidential candidate and South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg received a question about abortion on the campaign trail this week, made noteworthy in this case by the fact that the questioner was a 7-year-old girl.
During a town hall event Thursday in Henniker, New Hampshire, Buttigieg took a question from a 7-year-old girl who told him she “listened to you in the debates, and learned some stuff about you, and that you believe in a woman’s right to choose about her own body. I agree with that, no one should mess with or choose about my body except me and my parents because I’m still a child.”
Buttigieg said she sounded “pretty sophisticated for a child” and asked about her age, then remarked that she was “ahead of your time” upon learning she was just seven.
“I believe that you make your decision on whether you’re going to have a child, and then your decision is made, and the abortion is not part of it,” she continued. “What do you think about that?”
“Well, thanks for speaking up about this, and thanks for being here, and I wish I was as tuned in to big issues when I was seven as you seem to be,” Buttigieg answered. “This is a hard issue for a lot of people because they believe different things … this choice, it’s about drawing a line, and we might each, following our own beliefs, have a different idea about where to draw the line.”
“What I hope everybody, or at least most of us can agree on, is who gets to draw the line,” the mayor continued. “And that’s the person making the decision, that’s the woman in question. And I trust women to make that choice. I don’t think that choice is easy, I know that it’s not going to be any better because the government’s saying what it ought to be, I trust women to make that choice. And it sounds like you and I view this issue the same.”
It’s unclear whether the girl was reciting the standard “my body, my choice” talking point, or disputing it by suggesting that “abortion is not part of it” because the “choice” has already been made upon pregnancy and the baby already exists. Regardless, it is a settled biological fact that a zygote, embryo, or fetus is not part of the mother’s body, but rather a living, genetically-distinct human with his or her own body.
Buttigieg is running on a platform of appointing pro-abortion judges to the Supreme Court, making the abortion drug RU-486 available over the counter, and refusing to accept any limits on abortion in the latest stages of pregnancy. As mayor of South Bend, he vetoed Women’s Care Center’s re-zoning application to build a pro-life pregnancy center near the site of a proposed abortion center, and has largely dodged questions about the discovery of thousands of babies’ corpses on the property of a deceased area abortionist.
Buttigieg also claims to be a Christian, and has attempted to justify legal abortion on the grounds that “there’s a lot of parts of the Bible that talk about how life begins with breath.”
Pro-lifers assailed Buttigieg’s claim for twisting Scripture and ignoring science to justify abortion, particularly the idea that Genesis 2:7’s account of God creating Adam – “Then the Lord God formed a man(a) from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being” – is representative of how every subsequent human being came into existence.
Buttigieg currently ranks fourth in RealClearPolitics’ polling average of the Democrat primary, with 11.4 percent of the vote.