2024 presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy responded on Twitter after a video of him gently engaging with an angry protester went viral.
The GOP hopeful was speaking at a public event in Iowa with GOP state Chairman Jeff Kaufmann Monday evening when a woman started yelling from the back of the room about abortion rights.
As the protester shouted “Our SCOTUS won’t protect our women,” Ramaswamy echoed back his agreement that the country should “protect all women.”
The woman continued to interrupt the event, shouting “Republicans are raping people” before adding, “If somebody non-consensually rapes me, I’m not having their child.”
Journalist Link Lauren filmed the encounter and shared on Twitter where it garnered over a million views overnight.
As attendees tried to usher the woman out of the room, she continued to shout “Protect women” and “Don’t be a toxic male.”
Ramaswamy then invited the heckler, Kayla Crist of Stanwood, Iowa, to come back and finish giving her thoughts on the contentious issue.
“I want to give her a chance to speak,” he said. “You can say something to me, it’s OK. Come back.”
While wiping tears from her eyes, Crist confirmed she wanted to ask the candidate a question.
As she approached the stage, Crist reiterated to the Republican that if she was impregnated by a rapist she would not have their baby. “It’s my choice, it’s my body,” she said.
The woman then tearfully recounted her experience of having little support as a single mother.
“I’ve already raised my kids that somebody implanted in me and doesn’t take care of. The system does nothing for the single mother. There’s no child support, and nobody goes after them. I raised my child by myself,” she said. She went on to say her child was successful and happy and she didn’t want to be attacked for being a single mother.
Ramaswamy thanked the protester and commended her for doing “one of the most important things” in raising children in this world.
“I want to say: You’re doing one of the most important things, being a mother raising her children in this world,” he said. “Even if we have our disagreements, I want to say thank you. And part of what it means to live in this country is we have free speech. We get to speak our minds openly even if we all don’t agree.”
As she left the room, Ramaswamy asked the audience to applaud the woman for her courage to share her story.
Twitter users reacted to the viral video, saying they were impressed by how the candidate handled the hostile situation and touched by the “beautiful moment” that resulted from it.
Ramaswamy responded to the video by calling himself a “free speech absolutist.”
The 2024 GOP candidate has called himself “unapologetically pro-life” and said he considers abortion a form of murder. He believes the issue should be dealt with at the state level.
“I do think that abortion is a form of murder. But if you think that murder isn’t regulated by the federal government. Murder is done by state statutes. That’s how the Constitution works. And so for those reasons, I view abortion as a form of murder because I believe in the Constitution,” he previously told Fox News.
“This is not an answer for the president, because I think the federal government should be out of this,” Ramaswamy explained.
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Fox News’ Elizabeth Heckman contributed to this report.