If Mike Huckabee becomes president, he will consider using all available resources to stop abortions in the US – including a domestic military intervention.

At a succession of campaign stops this week, the former Arkansas governor said he would violate a landmark supreme court ruling to accomplish his goal of ending abortion.

“I will not pretend there is nothing we can do to stop this,” Huckabee said at one stop in Iowa.

The Rolling Stone reporter Matt Taibbi pressed Huckabee at the next campaign stop, asking if he would use the national guard or the FBI to stop abortions. Huckabee responded: “We’ll see, if I get to be president.”

He then said he would use all resources available to stop abortions if he were to reach the White House.

On Saturday, the Huckabee campaign did not respond to a request for details of exactly how he would use domestic military forces and law enforcement to stop abortions.

But during press questions at the campaign stop, Huckabee said he would invoke the fifth and 14th amendments to protect what he believes to be humans. The fifth amendment protects against trial without jury and ensures the due process of law; the 14th addresses citizenship and the rights of citizens.

Huckabee also defended the potential move by exaggerating how common it is for presidents to violate a supreme court ruling.

Jesse Choper, professor emeritus of public law at the University of California-Berkeley, told the Topeka Capital-Journal that presidents who oppose supreme court rulings generally favor noncompliance instead of aggressive action – and said even that was a rarity.

“I think he’d better more carefully examine what he’s saying, because it is totally unprecedented,” Choper said of Huckabee.

As expected, reproductive rights advocates criticized Huckabee’s comments.

Lizz Winstead, co-creator of The Daily Show and a founder of Lady Parts Justice, said: “Mike Huckabee wants to drive a tank into your vagina, so that’s a thing.”

“Well, we did say they’d stop at nothing,” tweeted Planned Parenthood, which Republicans are trying to defund, again.

Stages of a fetus are displayed while Republican presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee speaks at an event in Tinley Park, Illinois on Friday. Photograph: Scott Olson/Getty Images

Huckabee hit the headlines last weekend, when he told the rightwing media organization Breitbart that thanks to the Iran nuclear deal, President Obama would “take the Israelis and march them to the door of the oven”.

It was not the first time the former Arkansas governor had caused controversy with a reference to the Holocaust.

Last November, while in Europe, he said: “If you felt something incredibly powerful at Auschwitz and Birkenau over the 11 million killed worldwide and the 1.5 million killed on those grounds, cannot we feel something extraordinary about 55 million murdered in our own country in the wombs of their mothers?”

It also emerged on Friday that Huckabee, who the feminist website Jezebel calls “An Incredibly Menacing Adult Cabbage Patch Doll”, made nearly $1m from speeches in 2014. He also made $2.9m as president of his publishing company, a filing said.