NEW YORK — Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee today apologized for comments he made at Iowa’s Celebrate Life event on Saturday in which he compared abortion in America to the genocide of Jews during the Holocaust. In a statement, Mr. Huckabee, now a Fox News host, said he was sorry for making such an “obviously hyperbolic comparison,” adding, “I see now that abortion isn’t at all like the Holocaust, but really more akin to slavery.”

Over the weekend, Mr. Huckabee asserted to a group of fellow pro-Life advocates that America’s policy of allowing fetuses to be aborted within a limited gestational time period was akin to an “incredible Holocaust of our own in America.” Since making the comments, Mr. Huckabee has faced intense criticism from those who view such a comparison as misleading and offensive.

“I admit that I’m sometimes a little sloppy with my metaphors,” Mr. Huckabee said in an apologetic but defiant statement released subsequent to his speech. “I can get a little carried away with my emotions. So, yes, I agree that there’s a world of difference between abortion and the systematic murder of the Jewish people.”

“That said,” he continued. “It’s obvious that the more appropriate metaphor to use would have been America’s history with slavery… All right-minded folks will recognize that there’s virtually no difference between aborting a microscopic fetus and the three hundred years during which this nation brutally enslaved black people. That’s just a plain fact.”

A publicist for Mr. Huckabee further clarified the former presidential candidate’s position. “He means that each abortion is the exact equivalent to enslaving tens of millions of people of African descent. He calls it the ‘Huckabee Coefficient’…Man, I really need a new line of work.”

Pro-Choice advocacy groups and the NAACP have decided not to press Mr. Huckabee to retract his most recent comparison. “We’re hoping he’ll just go away,” a spokesperson for the NAACP told Newslo. “Plus, if we make him revise his metaphor a second time, he’ll probably just compare abortion to nuclear war or the Bubonic Plague, and it’ll be a whole new controversy. Frankly, we just don’t have the energy right now.”