Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee said on Thursday that God may not bless America again until the “nightmare” of Planned Parenthood came to an end. Speaking to a crowd at the Iowa State Fair, the former Arkansas governor said that the “steering mechanism” for the country needed to be based on “the laws of nature’s god.”

“Let us never apologize for who we are as a country,” he remarked. “A country that cannot be explained apart from the providence of God himself. There is no other explanation for the United States of America other than this providence and intervention.”

“And if we are going to invoke his blessing as we often do,” the candidate continued, “Here’s something we always say at the end of our speeches, ‘God bless you and God bless America.’ Every Democrat says it, every Republican says it.”

But Huckabee warned that Americans could not expect to “invoke God’s blessing on this country if we continue the slaughter of unborn children in their mother’s wombs, 60 million of whom have passed away since 1973.” “Let’s stop this slaughter,” he insisted. “And when I hear people say, ‘We’ll defund Planned Parenthood,’ wonderful, that’s terrific, we should do it.”

“But let’s do more than that. Let’s not just end funding for this nightmare, let’s end the nightmare and make it so when we ask God to bless us he can look down from heaven and say, ‘I will.’”