Housing and Urban Development (HUD) secretary Ben Carson isn’t afraid to call out the “barbaric” practice of killing unborn babies.
The famed former neurosurgeon, who has operated on babies inside the womb, spoke from the heart about the horrors of abortion during a panel discussion from CPAC on Thursday, arguing that babies inside the womb can feel pain and calling out those who refer to unborn infants as a “meaningless bunch of cells.”
“They can feel, they can react”
Carson was joined on the “The Heartbeat of Humanity” panel discussion at the 2019 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) by Republican Washington Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers and moderator Peggy Nance, president of Concerned Women for America.
Asked directly when life begins, Carson replied: “That’s a very good question because, with all the technology that we have acquired as human beings, we still don’t have the ability to create life. We don’t have the ability to create a human being.”
“But God has orchestrated an incredible situation where the egg and the sperm come together, and within a matter of 10 to 12 weeks, you can see the little fingers, and the little toes, the little nose, and the face,” he continued. “The heart is starting to beat. It’s absolutely amazing.”
Carson went on to say that the brain “develops very rapidly from there,” and he recounted operating on fetuses sometimes as early as 25 to 28 weeks into development.
“I can guarantee you they can feel, they can react,” the HUD secretary said. “You have to give them anesthesia if you’re going to cut them, believe me. But they can also respond to comfort and to warmth. And for somebody to say that that’s a meaningless bunch of cells, honestly, is just totally ignorant.”
Watch the full panel discussion:
“It’s barbaric”
Unsurprisingly, Carson wasn’t the only one disgusted by abortion at CPAC. The audience groaned audibly when the neurosurgeon graphically described the procedure, which he said involves a “grinding, sucking machine.”
“I mean, it’s barbaric,” Carson said of abortions early on in pregnancy. But late-term abortions are even worse.
“You have a baby that could live outside of the womb, but some people feel that it’s okay to murder that baby,” Carson lamented. “The level of barbarism that that requires — I, quite frankly, don’t know how people can do it.”
He said that doctors often try to “shield the mothers from the knowledge of what’s going on,” but even still, the procedure can have a detrimental effect on the woman’s mental health, a side effect that isn’t always advertised.
“How many of those mothers end up psychologically damaged? They talk about [how] they’re doing this for the health of the mother — what about the mother’s mental health, that she has to endure for the rest of her life?” Carson asked.
Indeed, the death of an unborn child is undoubtedly a heavy weight for a mother to bear, but liberals seem just as unconcerned about that as they are about the rights of the unborn. According to Carson, it’s up to conservatives to fight for those who can’t speak for themselves.
“It’s [going to] be up to us — people with morals and values — to stand up to it,” Carson said, “because we cannot let this happen in our society.”