One day after a television ad featuring GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s endorsement of him began to air, Indiana U.S. Senate candidate Richard Mourdock publicly said that when a woman becomes pregnant after a rape, “that’s something God intended.”
This puts Romney in a now-familiar bindneeding to do damage control after one of his allies goes public with a statement that many people find offensive. (The first was the Todd Akin comment that women who are raped rarely get pregnant.) It’s a situation corporate leaders also have faced, and it can impact everything from share price to employee engagement.
Here’s what happened this time. At a debate Tuesday night, when asked about whether abortion should be allowed in cases of rape or incest, Mourdock said: “I struggled with it myself for a long time, but I came to realize life is that gift from God. And I think even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something that God intended to happen.”
