Mike Huckabee: Fetuses deserve 'due process' -- and U.S. troops are 'one of the ways' to do it

Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee did not deny over the weekend that he would consider using federal troops or the FBI to stop abortions because he said that fetuses deserved "due process."

At a campaign stop in Iowa late last month, the former Arkansas governor said that he would invoke the Fifth and 14 Amendments to give fetuses the rights of people. When he was asked if he would use U.S. troops or the FBI to back the guarantee of equal rights for fetuses, Huckabee replied, “We’ll see, if I get to be president.”

On Sunday, Huckabee claimed that the media was trying to put words in his mouth, but he still declined to say that he would not use federal troops to prevent abortions.

"What I'm saying is that the real issue here is not whether we're going to give money to Planned Parenthood," he explained. "Yes, that's important. But the bigger issue is, is that unborn child a human being? Because if it is then the Fifth and the 14th Amendment apply because we're dealing with personhood."

"It means that you guarantee due process under the Fifth Amendment before you deprive someone of their life and liberty," Huckabee continued. "It means under the 14th Amendment there's equal protection under the law. Exactly how that plays out is one of the ways that we discover. What does it take for Americans to finally wake up to the fact that we are violating the constitutional rights of human beings?"

He pointed out that past presidents had employed "many different ways" to protect human rights, but he continued to deflect questions about how law enforcement and U.S. troops would be used under his plan to ban legal abortion.

"I think the bigger question is, let's establish the personhood of the individual," Huckabee insisted. "I don't think we can keep defending the loss of 60 million human lives over the past 42 years. We're not acting like a civilized people in the way in which abortion in its unrestricted fashion has continued."

Watch the video below from ABC's This Week, broadcast Aug. 9, 2015.