Conservative commentator Gina Loudon dedicated her WorldNetDaily column yesterday to defending Donald Trump’s recent comment that, if abortion is recriminalized, women who have illegal abortions should face “some form of punishment.”

Trump’s campaign, taking heat from the anti-abortion movement for blowing up its PR strategy, attempted to retract the candidate’s comments shortly after he made them. Two days later, Trump suggested that he didn’t actually want to change the current abortion laws at all, a position that his campaign also ended up retracting.

Loudon, however, was just fine with Trump’s initial suggestion that “there has to be some form of punishment” for women who have abortions, hailing the candidate for upending the debate on an important issue just as he did “when discussing illegal immigration.”

Loudon, defending Trump’s remarks, compared punishing a woman for having an abortion to prosecuting a person who “hires a contractor to kill someone.”

“Conservatives herald ‘the rule of law’ when discussing illegal immigration, but why do the rules suddenly change when we are talking about the killing of an unborn child?” she asked.

“His view was consistent with many things conservatives say,” Loudon continued. “He just didn’t know this was the unspeakable – kind of like saying we should stop illegal immigration was the unspeakable before Trump dared to say otherwise.”

Indeed, Loudon noted that Trump is simply saying what many people in the anti-abortion believe but refuse to say publicly: “Is there a pro-lifer out there that doesn’t think that in a perfect world — where we agreed abortion was, for example, illegal after the first trimester – that the woman could, if working with full knowledge, be held accountable for her complicity in the abortion? Shouldn’t this, like any law that is broken, be considered in a case-by-case manner?”

Abortion rights opponents who criticize Trump, Loudon argued, have decided to “jump on the gender identity ‘women are always victims’ bandwagon” rather than argue that women should be held accountable through prosecutions, making Trump “even more pro-life than the [sic] some of the pro-life groups out there.”