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In Tuesday night’s Indiana Senate race debate, Republican candidate and Tea Party member Richard Mourdock made comments about pregnancy that results from rape that garnered major controversy: “I think that even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something that God intended to happen.”

The comments came just days after Governor Romney recorded a TV ad endorsing Mourdock for Senate.. The ad has continued to play, even as high profile GOP members like Senator John McCain have withdrawn their support for Mourdock unless he apologizes for his comments.

Mourdock’s statement is just the latest in a series of similar comments made by GOP members during the recent election season which point to the Party’s steady move towards the extremes of right wing conservatism in their base, particularly on the issue of abortion and women’s reproductive rights. These include Senate candidate Todd Akin’s stated theory this past August that women’s bodies automatically forgo pregnancies that result from “legitimate rape,” and Tea Party member Sharron Angle who called a pregnancy resulting from a father raping his daughter, a chance to make “a lemon situation into lemonade.”

Despite such comments, there has been a noticeable drift of women voters away from President Obama toward Governor Romney in the Presidential race according to recent polls. Obama’s support among women voters is down 3 percentage points compared to when he ran against John McCain four years ago, according to the most recent Gallup Poll.

Romney has been gaining popularity with women voters despite his own ever changing stance on abortion, his unclear responses to a question about equal pay for women, and his suggestion that marriage can solve problems of gun violence.

GUEST: Sarah Posner, senior editor for Religion Dispatches and author of God’s Profits: Faith, Fraud, and the Republican Crusade for Values Voters

Visit www.religiondispatches.org for more information and to read Posner’s writings.