WASHINGTON, Nov. 4 (UPI) -- Former President Jimmy Carter says the Democratic Party should moderate its stance on abortion.
"I've never been convinced, if you let me inject my Christianity into it, that Jesus Christ would approve abortion," Carter said during a breakfast with reporters.
He suggested that his party is "over-emphasizing the abortion issue;" the Washington Times reported.
Carter was elected president three years after the landmark Supreme Court ruling in Roe vs. Wade. In interviews, he has said that as president he had to uphold the law, no matter his personal views.
Robert Knight of the Culture and Family Institute of Concerned Women of America, called Carter's statement "astonishing."
"Maybe with Jimmy Carter saying things he never uttered before, more liberals will rethink their worship of abortion as the high holy sacrament of liberalism," Knight said.
Carter's most recent book, "Endangered Values," has just come out. In the book and in interviews, he has also suggested that conservative Christians are trying to blur the line between church and state.
