Is Ben Carson’s campaign “imploding on the life issue”?

Following the revelation that he studied cells from aborted babies in 1992, presidential candidate Dr. Ben Carson endorsed the use of RU-486 in an interview with Neil Cavuto of Fox News.

The retired neurosurgeon said that in rape cases, “I would hope that they would very quickly avail themselves of the emergency room, and in the emergency room, they have the ability to administer RU-486 and other possibilities before you have a developing fetus.”

As Live Action News has covered, RU-486 is recognized by both sides as an abortion-inducing drug, and has been linked to at least fifteen deaths over the past twenty years.

A Planned Parenthood official commenting on the story for The Hill speculated that Carson may have been “mixing up emergency contraception (also known as the morning-after pill), with the abortion pill.” But while many posit so-called emergency contraception as an alternative to abortion, it in fact also has the capacity to function as an abortifacient.

Fellow presidential candidates Marco Rubio and Rand Paul have also expressed support for the morning-after pill, despite running on pro-life platforms.

Carson also indicated that the discrepancy may be due to believing that life begins “once the heart starts beating, certainly at that point,” rather than at the moment of fertilization.

Commenting on these developments, pro-life blogger Shane Vander Hart of the Caffeinated Thoughts blog described Carson’s campaign as “implod[ing] on the life issue,” noting this is a departure from his website’s declaration that life begins at conception and wondering if he has “damaged his pro-life street cred beyond repair.”