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AMES, Iowa, August 12, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Former U.S. Senator Rick Santorum elicited cheers from a crowd in Ames, Iowa during the first primary debate there Thursday night for not backing down in defense of the right to life of children conceived in rape.

One moderator, Fox News host Byron York, asked Santorum: “Polls have shown that large majorities of Americans support some exceptions for abortion. Are your views too much, even for many conservatives to support?”

“You know, the Supreme Court of the United States in a recent case said that a man who committed rape could not be killed, would not be subjected to the death penalty, yet the child conceived as a result of that rape could be,” replied the former senator.

“That sounds to me like a country that doesn’t have its morals correct. That child did nothing wrong,” he said to cheers and applause. “That child is an innocent victim.”

“We in America should be big enough to try to surround ourselves and help women in those terrible situations who have been traumatized already. To put them through another trauma of an abortion is enough,” he concluded. “And so I would absolutely stand and say, one violence is enough.”

This year’s Gallup survey of America’s attitude toward abortion found the majority believing the procedure to be morally wrong, 51 percent to 39 percent. Nonetheless, as in previous years, a marked plurality supported keeping the procedure legal under “certain circumstances.”

Federal law currently allows taxpayer funding of abortion of unborn children conceived in rape or incest, or whose gestation threatens the life of the mother.