In many local races, the key to support is a rabidly anti-choice platform. Nowhere is this more true than in western Iowa’s 6th District, the home of Steve King.

State Senate candidate Mark Segebart fits that bill, and Caroll Iowa reporter Doug Burns (with whom I used to work) grills him on his condescending view of women as “victims” too easily influenced to understand what an abortion is.

Via the Daily Times Herald:

“My view of the woman who needs to have an abortion is that she’s a victim,” Segebart said in an interview. “The baby is a victim because it’s being aborted. The woman I think is a victim of society in that society has led women to believe that there’s nothing wrong with abortion in the first place. Society has become numb to that fact over the last almost 40 years now….the guilty party is not the woman,” Segebart said of abortion. “It’s the system. It’s our whole system here that says it was legal to do it for the last 40 years. That was a false premise in my mind because the liberals and the women’s movement sold that idea that it was a fetus and not a baby. So they’re victims. The mother is a victim just like the child is a victim in an abortion. So to penalize that woman because she’s bought into a false premise, I don’t think is fair.” Sex. Abortion. Parenthood. Power. The latest news, delivered straight to your inbox. SUBSCRIBE So I put the question directly to Segebart: If women are so mentally or morally weak that they can’t claim responsibility for the decision to have an abortion, and all the consequences it entails, the choice of whether a life enters the world or not, are they capable of making any life calls of import? If women are so easily cast in the role of unwitting victim are they even intelligent enough to vote? Would we better off if we repealed that right for women? “Women are intelligent enough to make the decision and so are men,” he said. “Why are women the only ones that are held responsible here. Half the problem were the men involved. If that’s the case we should probably have the same penalty for the men that were involved.”

Hmmm… maybe we should take away everyone’s right to vote?