Oh, Herman Cain. You may know about bad pizza and three-digit economic plans, but you're clearly in over your head on this whole "pro-life" thing. Because you're doing it so, so wrong.

In an interview with CNN’s Piers Morgan, you start out strong:

I believe that life beings at conception, and abortion under no circumstances.

So far, so good. No abortion under any circumstances. Rape, life of the mother ... forget that. (And definitely forget non-issues like a woman's right to privacy and dignity because she should be allowed to make her own decisions without the government climbing up her uterus.) Abortion is wrong, wrong, wrong—under any circumstances. Ask any Republican; they'll tell you how sacred every sperm really is.

But here's where Herman loses his "pro-life" bona fides:

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 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 try to tell them what decision to make for such a sensitive decision. [...] 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 a social decision that they need to make.

Whoa. Herman Cain just articulated exactly what the pro-choice position is. Word for word. He might as well be filming an ad for NARAL. Because that is the pro-choice position: it's a choice the mother has to make. No one else. Not the pizza mogul, not Michele Bachmann and her 10,000 children, not terrorist organizations like Operation Rescue, not Rep. Joe Pitts and his pitiful Protect Life Act Let Women Die bill. And, as Cain said:

it's not the government's role, or anybody else's role, to make that decision.

Don't expect this to remain Herman's position, though. Just as he said earlier this week that he'd release the prisoners at Guantanamo and negotiate with Al Qaeda, only to reverse himself and say he "misspoke," someone will no doubt sit Herman down and explain things to him, and he'll be "misspoking" this too. Because he simply cannot advertise himself as a "pro-life" Republican while expressing any sort of sympathy whatsoever with the very radical position that women should be allowed to make their own health care decisions without the government telling them what to do.

(Via Think Progress)

