Fox News comment on Romney--“self abjination?”

Question

Watching the discussion led by Dana Perino after the GOP debate this evening, Perino asked if "humility" was a good thing.

Another commentator remarked, "humility yes, self-abjination no." (The spelling is a guess.)

Perino said, "abjination? I don't know that word." Someone else said "must be one of those Harvard words." The commentator said, "it means self deprecating."

So what is the word? I tried Googling some variants, but came up dry.

Answer 1

Self-abnegation would be my guess as to what was meant.

As a noun, the word self-abnegation is defined by dictionary.com as

the denial of one's own interests in favour of the interests of others

Some synonyms from The Visual Thesarus for self-abnegation are

• humility
• self-denial
• abjuration
• self-deprecation

Answer 2

I would have thought the spelling was self-abdignation suggesting denying your own dignity.

Google suggests that the use of abdignation or self-abdignation is extremely rare. I suppose that people might coin them by modelling words like abnegation, abjuration, abdication and indignation.