Obama and his followers have long been fond of slurring the pro-life movement by saying pro-lifers don’t care about children or people once they’ve been born. This, of course, is patent nonsense. If you look at the organizations and the people who support the larger pro-life movement you generally find the same organizations and people actively involved in adoption, foster care, elder care, helping the homeless, etc.

So it is somewhat surprising that New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who spent Super Bowl Sunday burnishing his foreign policy credentials by watching a soccer game in London, used that trip to parrot the same slur:

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, a potential 2016 presidential contender, called on Tuesday for fellow Republicans to adopt a more compassionate approach to drug addiction, saying addicts needed treatment rather than jail.

Christie said addiction should be treated like a disease, and said those in his party who were opposed to abortion on the principle that life is sacred, should be more sympathetic to those who had made mistakes.

“When I talk to folks in my party, being pro-life, I say it’s easy to be pro-life when they’re in the womb, they haven’t done anything wrong yet, you know, they haven’t made any bad judgements,” he said during a visit to a drug treatment centre in south London as part of a trip to Britain.

“Tell me that you’re pro-life with a kid who’s lying on the floor of a jail cell basement, addicted to drugs.”

The most charitable thing that can be said about this comment is that he’s trying to raise consciousness about drug abuse. (Or maybe he’s advocating the summary execution of drug addicts… with Christie one doesn’t quite know.) That fails, though, when he says, “it’s easy to be pro-life when they’re in the womb.” He’s clearly going back to the pro-abortion critique and to a certain extent, since the pro-life movement mostly lives with conservative politics, it is his way of making himself a “compassionate” candidate rather than your run-of-the-mill heartless conservative.