Huckabee on Paraguay child rape pregnancy: Don’t compound tragedy with death

Former Arkansas Governor and Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee has waded into the controversy over an 11-year-old rape victim in Paraguay who has given birth after being denied an abortion, Mediaite reports.

While expressing sympathy for the hardships the child has endured and will continue to face, he maintained in a CNN interview with Dana Bash that “there are no easy answers here.”

“A 10-year-old girl being raped is horrible. But does it solve a problem by taking the life of an innocent child?” Huckabee asked. “When I think about one horror, I think about the possibilities that exist and I don’t want to think that somehow we discount a human life.”

He also reminded Bash of the possibility that even if she had gotten an abortion, she could “go through extraordinary guilt years later when she begins to think through what happened with the baby,” and determined that the correct course of action would be to “not compound a tragedy by taking yet another life.”

On Friday, LifeSiteNews reported that the girl, known in the press as Mainumby, is said to be in good health, as is her daughter, whom she has named Milagros (Spanish for “miracles”). LSN quotes Minister of Health Antonio Barrios as having been “in total disagreement with regard to the possibility of interrupting the pregnancy” by abortion, noting that Mainumby was “being continuously attended to.”