I was reading about Saturday's debate and came across these quotes.

I believe that if a woman has been raped, that is a birth and a pregnancy that she should be able to terminate. If she is the victim of incest, this is not a woman’s choice. This is a woman being violated. And the fact is that we have always has believed, as has Ronald Reagan, that we have self-defense for women who have been raped and impregnated because of it, or the subject of incest and been impregnated for it. That woman should not have to deliver that child if they believe that violation is now an act of self-defense by terminating that pregnancy.

- See more at: https://www.conservativereview.com/commentary/2016/02/christies-horrible-no-good-answer-about-abortion#sthash.ffzj4IGI.dpuf

I would rather lose an election than be wrong on the issue of life.

Rubio probably said more along with this statement, but that is all this article provided.

Quote from: Marco Rubio

I would rather lose an election than be wrong on the issue of life.

Rubio probably said more along with this statement, but that is all this article provided.

And God willing, you will lose the election, Marco Rubio.

I also stumbled upon this website, FWIW:

http://www.ontheissues.org/2016_Hopefuls.htm

The site is supposed to list the positions of the candidates.

e.g.
http://www.ontheissues.org/Marco_Rubio.htm

Here are comments from Ben Carson from December.

Ben Carson: “Abortion is Murder and That’s Just Telling the Truth”

Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson defended his pro-life position this week in Iowa after facing criticism for comments he made about the pro-life movement and Terri Schiavo.

“My position is that abortion should not be done,” Carson told Bloomberg Politics. “I believe that it’s murder and I don’t think that’s hateful speech. That’s just telling the truth.”

As evidence of his pro-life position, Carson, a retired neurosurgeon, told people to look at his life. Carson said he is the only candidate running for president who has saved people’s lives.

“I’m the only one who has ever operated on premature babies all night long to save them – the only one who’s operated on babies inside of the womb, the only one who’s come up with new techniques and procedures to save lives, over which I got a lot of controversy early on, but now many of those things have become standard procedure that continue to save lives all over the world,” Carson told Bloomberg.

Carson said he opposes abortion in cases of rape and incest, too. He told the interviewer that he knows people who were born as a result of rape, including televangelist James Robinson whose mother was raped and almost aborted him.

“And he’s had a positive impact on hundreds of thousands of lives,” Carson said.

Last month, Carson blamed “peer pressure” for American’s acceptance of abortion as a “woman’s right,” during a speech at the First Choice Pregnancy Center banquet in Las Vegas, according to Raw Story.

“Someone has tried to make this into an issue of women’s rights,” the former neurosurgeon told the pro-life crowd Monday. “What about the baby? You know, it’s one of the most sacred relationships in the universe, a mother and that child inside of her.

“How have we become so distorted that we have managed to convince women that that baby inside of her is her enemy and that she has a right to kill it,” Carson said.

the rest here:
http://www.lifenews.com/2015/12/09/ben-carson-abortion-is-murder-and-thats-just-telling-the-truth/

Voting in American elections is useless. None of these candidates would ever ban abortion let's face it or make women pay who did an abortion or make the abortionist doctor pay for doing it.

A valid opinion.

I think some of these guys are sincere and some are giving lip service.
I think of those who are sincere, some wouldn't have the fortitude to make any changes at all.
I think that those who would successfully attempt to bring about change will only be able to bring small changes, but small changes do eventually add up to bigger things.
I don't think it's all a pointless endeavor.

In looking up John Kasich's statements, I found this article which is particularly relevant to those who think that voting for pro-life candidates is pointless.

John Kasich’s Quiet Campaign To Cut Abortion Access

In June 2013, after 30 years in business, the Center for Choice performed its last abortion and closed its doors. The Toledo, Ohio, clinic had long been a target for anti-abortion activists — there was Marjorie Reed, the arsonist who set fire to the center in 1986, and a man staffers called “B.O. Bob,” a local schoolteacher who would call the clinic after hours, jamming up the voice mail box with his rants. But it was not firebombs or bellicose picketers that eventually forced the Center for Choice to close. The clinic packed it in because of a far more discreet, yet in some ways harder to ignore, incursion: a torrent of restrictions on abortions and abortion providers from Ohio’s statehouse.

“It started to feel like a witch hunt,” Sue Postal, the center’s director, told me in October. She always knew the anti-abortion movement was pushing legislation that would make her job more difficult, but the past five years have been some of the hardest for Ohio abortion providers, now that a new Republican, anti-abortion governor has taken over. “Under Kasich it’s happening.”

Since entering office in January 2011, John Kasich, Ohio’s governor and now a GOP presidential hopeful, has signed every abortion and women’s reproductive health provision that has landed on his desk. In four and a half years he has enacted 16 legislative proposals related to family planning funding and abortion access across the state. Although anti-abortion provisions are not limited to the Buckeye State — a July count from the Guttmacher Institute, an abortion-rights advocacy group, showed that 31 states have enacted a total of 282 abortion restrictions since January 2011 — Ohio stands out for the rate at which it’s adopting this legislation. The measures have altered when, where and by whom a pregnancy can be terminated in the state. And although Ohio is seen as a wild success story for anti-abortion advocates, the details of Kasich’s hard-line stance are often obscured. As governor he concealed his administration’s role in the creation of several anti-abortion measures, and now he is viewed as one of the most moderate candidates in a GOP race that tips far to the right.

 - The Center for Choice in Toledo, Ohio, closed in 2013 facing difficulties securing an agreement with a local hospital to accept abortion patients in the event of a complication. -

Michael Gonidakis, president of the anti-abortion group Ohio Right to Life and a 2012 Kasich appointee to the state medical board, considers Ohio to be in a “golden era” for anti-abortion activism, with an anti-abortion supermajority in the state House and Senate. But he said the swift passage of new laws limiting abortion would not have been possible without Kasich’s leadership. “We’ve never had a governor in my lifetime that was laser-focused on the issue of life like John Kasich is today,” he said, later adding, “John Kasich deserves the credit for creating an environment and atmosphere here for the 65 [anti-abortion] members of the House and the 23 [anti-abortion] members of our Senate to pass a litany of pro-life bills.”

Since Kasich entered office, half of the state’s surgical abortion clinics have stopped providing abortion services, including Center for Choice. In 2011, there were 16 surgical abortion providers in Ohio serving nearly 2.3 million women of reproductive age. By 2013, the number had dropped to 14. The next year, after a slew of restrictions passed in the budget, that number dipped to 10. By 2015, eight abortion providers had closed their doors, moved to different states or stopped providing services. No state, other than Texas, with nearly 6 million women of reproductive age, has lost so many clinics in this span of time. After a clinic an hour south of Cleveland was approved this summer to start performing surgical abortions, the now nearly 2.5 million women of reproductive age in Ohio have nine surgical abortion providers to choose from. (Women in their first trimester of pregnancy have the option of abortion through surgery or medication. In 2014, only 5 percent of women who had abortions in Ohio opted for the medication method. The state requires doctors administering medication abortions to adhere to an older standard, one known to have high failure rates, and many of Ohio’s abortion providers do not offer abortions via medication for this reason.)

The slew of new provisions has meant not only fewer options but also more obstacles for women looking to terminate a pregnancy, and in turn it has affected who is able to get an abortion in the state.

Overall, abortions in Ohio were down 25 percent in 2014 from 2010, according to the state Department of Health. Nationally, abortion rates fell by 12 percent in that time period — a reduction that is in line with a downward trend that started in the 1990s, though some believe that trend has less to do with restrictions and more to do with a decrease in unwanted pregnancies.

According to state data, white women accounted for a slightly smaller share of those who got abortions in Ohio in 2014 compared with 2010. Abortions among teens fell 50 percent, a decrease that abortion-rights advocates attribute to a 2011 bill Kasich signed that made it more difficult for minors to obtain consent from a judge if they wanted an abortion without a parent or guardian’s permission.

Less-educated women were 42 percent less likely to get an abortion in 2014 than in 2010, and women were also getting abortions later in their pregnancies. Abortion-rights advocates say the reason for this latter trend is threefold: Women living in the 82 of Ohio’s 88 counties with no abortion provider must take into consideration the protracted travel times, the costs of getting to a clinic not once but twice (Ohio requires an ultrasound 24 hours before an abortion procedure), and the fact that there are longer wait times at the remaining clinics.

more at this link:
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/john-kasichs-quiet-campaign-to-cut-abortion-access/

This story was from August, but is circulating today for obvious reasons.

Trump says his pro-abortion sister would make ‘phenomenal’ Supreme Court justice

Maryanne Trump Barry came up in my book The Party of Death for writing one of those heated judicial decisions in favor of giving constitutional protection to partial-birth abortion. She called a New Jersey law against it a “desperate attempt” to undermine Roe v. Wade. It was, she wrote, “based on semantic machinations, irrational line-drawing, and an obvious attempt to inflame public opinion instead of logic or medical evidence.” It made no difference where the fetus was when it “expired.”

Michael Gonidakis, president of the anti-abortion group Ohio Right to Life and a 2012 Kasich appointee to the state medical board, considers Ohio to be in a “golden era” for anti-abortion activism, with an anti-abortion supermajority in the state House and Senate. But he said the swift passage of new laws limiting abortion would not have been possible without Kasich’s leadership. “We’ve never had a governor in my lifetime that was laser-focused on the issue of life like John Kasich is today,” he said, later adding, “John Kasich deserves the credit for creating an environment and atmosphere here for the 65 [anti-abortion] members of the House and the 23 [anti-abortion] members of our Senate to pass a litany of pro-life bills.”

This jumped out at me. Even with an "anti-abortion supermajority" in all levels of government they didn't do much more than pass minor incremental laws. I searched for a few minutes and found evidence that Kasich has in fact opposed the strongest pro-life legislation proposed in his tenure, a heartbeat bill that would prohibit abortion after around the sixth week.

Now Kasich said that his opposition was strategic, since the legislation was supposedly too radical and would open doors to litigation that might hurt the pro-life cause. His opposition was gutless but not entirely senseless. These judges have frightening power in the US.

There's a fundamental problem with an incremental, state-based approach, in that all this legislation recognizes the right to abortion, and merely seeks to limit it. In other words, a law which for instance bans the abortion of "viable" children thereby recognizes the right to abort non-viable children. If Roe vs. Wade were ever overturned at the federal level, all of the incrementalist state legislation recognizing abortion "rights" would still exist and would take forever to overturn.

Really, the pro-life movement is a catch-22. Every "success" it achieves actually entrenches the abortionist regime. The only efficient solution (other than a chastisement) is a pro-life dictatorship. That's why I think right wingers should welcome the transition of Western culture to a caesarist phase.