In a series of interviews that they are hosting with presidential candidates for the Catholic television network EWTN, social conservative leader Robert George and his Princeton colleague Matthew Franck have asked every single candidate who has participated whether they would attempt to work around Roe v. Wade through federal legislation granting “personhood” rights to zygotes and fetuses.

Mike Huckabee has made issuing an executive fiat establishing fetal “personhood” and banning abortion a centerpiece of his presidential campaign. Ted Cruz told EWTN that he would back such a plan and Rick Santorum made a vaguer promise to “push back on a court that got it wrong.”

Up this week was Ben Carson, who, when asked by Franck if he would be willing to sign anti-abortion legislation declaring that life begins at conception and “set up a conflict with the Supreme Court,” responded, “Yeah, I would definitely be willing to engage in that kind of confrontation, very much the same way that Abraham Lincoln was willing to engage in confrontation with the Dred Scott case.”

He added that in such cases “there is not only the right to intervene, there is the duty to intervene.”