UKIP leader wants 12 week abortion limit and death penalty for 'child killers'
Paul Nuttall has some questions to answer. Speaking on LBC, the new UKIP leader was asked to clarify this views on abortion and the death penalty.
Host Nick Ferrari quoted Nuttall as saying:
“Advertising abortion trivialises what is in reality killing an unborn child. The potential psychological implications for the mothers’ child are well-documented. Killers such as Ian Brady and Ian Huntley have their human rights and did not face the death penalty for taking the lives of children.”
Ferrari added:
“Some would say you’re likening abortion to the Moors murders and Ian Huntley.”
Nuttall squeeked that he supports reducing the abortion limit to twelve weeks and would vote ‘yes’ in a referendum on bringing back the death penatly for ‘child killers’ like Brady and Huntley.
This is bad enough, but this raises a moral and policy question Nuttall has yet to answer.
If he stands by his view that abortion is ‘killing an unborn child’, and supports the death penalty for ‘child killers’, would he also support the death penalty for doctors who perform abortions?
If so, would he extend this to any accomplices to the ‘killing’, such as the aborted foetus’s mother?
Given the rightward turn politics is taking, these are not academic questions. It wouldn’t be too far fetched to imagine the Prime Minister who is bringing back grammar schools and endorses Christian fundamentalists adding the death penalty to her list of crowd-pleasing steps backwards.
Naturally it would start with some qualifier, such as people who have killed a child, but it won’t stop there.
It can just as easily be imagined that May would place more restrictions on abortion – and no doubt be praised by the Daily Mail for her troubles.
As on other matters (chiefly the EU, whose human rights laws will soon no longer protect us from such policies), UKIP’s off-stage noises might create the space for the Tories to go even further in the future, and the international climate would no doubt lend a hand.
Republicans in the US are looking to cut funding for Planned Parenthood, which provides a range of women’s health services along with performing abortions. During the election campaign, Donald Trump suggested women should be ‘punished’ for having abortions, though he later took this back, claiming he was misunderstood.
Anyone leading a serious party in this country ought to be forced to justify their public statements and policy positions, including the logical and moral extentions of those policies.
UKIP is serious only in how it can influence public debate. (The party still only has one MP, Douglas Carswell, a Tory defector who is practically an independent.)
Perhaps the next time Nuttall pops up on television or radio, gleaming like a soft-boiled egg, someone might want to ask him if he thinks ‘child killing’ abortion doctors should be executed?
Adam Barnett is staff writer for Left Foot Forward. Follow him on Twitter @AdamBarnett13
See: Radio UKIP: LBC just gave Nigel Farage his own radio show
See: Meet the UKIPs: Paul Nuttall’s band of merry spokespeople
See: Paul Nuttall defends UKIP’s 2015 manifesto. What was in it?
One Response to “Does Paul Nuttall think abortion doctors should face the death penalty?”
Jimmy Glesga
Actually I have met many on the left mainly Catholic types who abhore abortion. It is not a right wing issue just a human one.