Pro-Life-After-Birth

Robin Toner writes in today's New York Times:

Former Gov. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas announced Sunday that he was forming a presidential exploratory committee, mounting an underdog campaign for the Republican nomination with “a message of hope and optimism for restoring America.” . . .

He also spoke about his staunch opposition to abortion rights, saying, “I always am going to err on the side of life.” But the anti-abortion movement, he said, has to do “some growing and expanding.”

“We have to remind people that life, where we believe it begins at conception, it doesn’t end at birth,” Mr. Huckabee added. “And if we’re really pro-life, we have to be concerned about more than the gestation period.”

See Ex-Arkansas Governor Joins Race for G.O.P. Nomination.  Huckabee has a point.  In 2000, Jean Reith Schroedel, a political science professor, published Is the Fetus a Person: A Comparison of Policies Across the Fifty States.  Schroedel hypothesized that, if true to their rhetoric, "pro-life" states (meaning those that had the most restrictive abortion laws) would spend more than other states do on needy children.  She found the opposite: states with the strongest antiabortion laws provided less funding than strongly pro-choice states for children in foster care, parents of adopted children with special needs, and poor women with dependent children.