Republican congressman Steve King has tried to defend a proposal for absolutist abortion restrictions on Wednesday by saying that without rape and incest the human race might long since have disappeared.

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“What if we went back through all the family trees and just pulled out anyone who was a product of rape or incest?” King told a breakfast meeting in Urbandale, Iowa. “Would there be any population of the world left if we did that? Considering all the wars and all the rapes and pillages that happened throughout all these different nations, I know that I can’t say that I was not a part of a product of that.”

King, who has been praised by Donald Trump as possibly “the world’s most conservative human being”, has sponsored a bill to ban abortion including in cases of rape and incest. Republican leaders, who earlier this year stripped King of his committee assignments after the congressman defended white supremacists, have mothballed the bill.

But Republicans in Iowa could send King back to Congress next year. Though he has lost his party’s support and is losing the fundraising race against a primary opponent, King, a nine-term congressman from Iowa’s fourth district, remains popular at home and is seen as tough to beat.

It was on the campaign trail in Iowa that King stepped into his latest controversy. In remarks first reported by the Des Moines Register, King told the breakfast crowd on Wednesday that abortion should not be allowed in any case.

“It’s not the baby’s fault for the sin of the father, or of the mother,” King said.

The comments drew widespread condemnation, including from the Democratic presidential field. Senators Kirsten Gillibrand and Cory Booker called for King’s resignation. Pete Buttigieg said: “You would think it would be pretty easy to come out against rape and incest. Then again, you’d think it’d be pretty easy to come out against white nationalism. So this is just one more example why there needs to be a sane representative in that district.”

In the past, King has expressed skepticism that pregnancy could result from rape. After then Senate candidate Todd Akin said in 2012 that “if it’s legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut the whole thing down,” King suggested Akin might be right.

“Well,” King said, “I just haven’t heard of that being a circumstance that’s been brought to me in any personal way, and I’d be open to discussion about that subject matter.”

King later defended himself, saying: “I never said, nor do I believe, a woman, including minors, cannot get pregnant from rape, statutory rape or incest.”

In a long history of incendiary racist and anti-immigrant remarks, King has often lapsed into cartoonish discussions of world history, in some cases using the phrase “western civilization” to mean “white people”.

Steve King (@SteveKingIA) Wilders understands that culture and demographics are our destiny. We can't restore our civilization with somebody else's babies. https://t.co/4nxLipafWO

King’s thinking on the topic has led him to meet and cultivate alliances with prominent nativist and far-right political leaders in Europe, Canada and elsewhere. At Trump’s inauguration, King hosted three leaders of the far-right Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ), which has implausibly denied Nazi sympathies.

In an interview with the New York Times published in January, King rhetorically said “white nationalist, white supremacist, western civilization – how did that language become offensive?”

That comment led Republicans in Congress to remove King from committees and a political action committee to defeat him was launched in Iowa. The National Republican congressional committee has announced it is sitting out the King re-election race. If he survives the primary campaign, King will face JD Scholten, in a rematch race after Scholten nearly defeated King in 2018.