He says Paul wouldn’t try to ban the morning-after pill, if only because it’s infeasible to do so. That alone pushes him down to no better than, oh, 98-99% pro-life, right?

More seriously, I’m not sure how much this clarify the mass confusion caused by his CNN appearance but here’s the official word from Team Rand via Life Site News:

Paul “was speaking medically,” Stafford said.

By “thousands of exceptions,” Stafford told LifeSiteNews.com, Paul meant that a singular exception to save the life of the mother would likely cover thousands of individual cases – for example, ectopic pregnancies or others that directly threaten the mother’s life.

The senator is not in favor of the more nebulous “health of the mother” exception that pro-life advocates argue can be applied to any woman facing an unwanted pregnancy.

As for the morning-after pill:

But what about Paul’s statement that the Life at Conception Act may not be able to address early abortions? That, too, was a misunderstanding, according to Stafford. He said the senator was talking about things like emergency contraception pills, which may cause very early abortions, but since they contain the exact same drugs used in standard birth control pills, the senator believes they will be nearly impossible to ban.

Senator Paul “has always said it is not practically possible to legislate things like the morning after pill or other emergency contraception,” Stafford said. “It simply isn’t possible to do so. The law will likely never be able to reach that.”

“You can legislate abortifacients like RU-486, and he would,” he said. “But you can’t legislatively ban artificial estrogen and progesterone.”

His dad once made the same point about the morning-after pill at a GOP presidential debate. But go back to the first point, about how Paul was speaking “medically” when talking about the “thousands of exceptions” to the Life At Conception Act he imagined. How does that clarify what he said yesterday? You can pick up the vid below at 1:30 or so and watch his answer. He does talk about his experiences as a physician, but if all he’s saying is that an exception for the life of the mother would apply to many different circumstances, well, we all already knew that. Everyone understands that pregnancy potentially can cause different life-threatening complications. Why not simply say, “Yeah, exception for the life of the mother” and leave it at that? Paul sounds in the clip as though he’s straining for a standard looser than that, which is odd given that he’s become known very quickly as a pol with impressive retail skills and a deft touch in communicating. Suddenly, over the past three days, he’s gotten verrrry hazy about immigration terminology and now abortion terminology — coincidentally, two issues that will be especially difficult when trying to split the difference between conservatives and libertarians in 2016. Is his new strategy to be just vague enough so that both sides can interpret his rhetoric as essentially agreeing with their position?