General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Santorum: Our Abortion Was Different [View all]ProgressiveEconomist
(5,818 posts)The case that the 1996 Santorum pregnancy actually ended in abortion is, IMO, EXTREMELY weak.
But IMO there IS an important legitimate headline here, one for Newt Gingrich and Willard Romney to push, NOT Democrats. The headline should be,
'Santorum approved late-term abortion for his own wife in 1996 if necessary to save her life.'
But because Karen Santorum miscarried/spontaneously aborted her fatally deformed child without labor-inducing drugs, the abortion the Santorums had authorized did not need to be performed. The last REPLY in the link in the OP makes the POLITICALLY RELEVANT poiint perfectly:
"Reply 23. Susan says: October 14, 2011 at 7:44 am
The Santorums may have exhausted all alternatives, but, BY THEIR OWN ADMISSIONS, they WOULD have had an abortion if her life had been at stake. In other words, THE EXACT PROCEDURE THEY ARE TRYING TO DENY EVERYONE ELSE. They ARE hypocrites (even though HIS hypocrisy is the important one, he being the public figure), & no amount of equivocating about the medical differences can change that. Oh, & to the coward who pretending to shield his family, ½This is about conservatives who hate their betters."
In an earlier rejoinder, the blog post author virtually admits she over-hyped her blog post title:
Reply 19. Ellen (Shaffer, author of the blog post in the OP) says: July 21, 2011 at 2:25 am
Sorry just catching up with all this. Others have said it better than I but to be as clear as possible: what the Santorums did was a technical distinction without a difference. Technically, an uninduced termination at 20 weeks is on the cusp between a miscarriage and prematurity; but there is no prospect for survival at that age, and there were other health complications in this case.
The pregnancy was not viable. Karen Santorum did not go to the hospital to deliver a child and did not. Her baby was, sadly, doomed. The pregnancy was close to a spontaneous abortion, but in this case it was terminated under close medical supervision; had surgical intervention been necessary to actually extract the fetus, and incidentally to save her life, she was prepared to authorize it. (For the sake of the children, of course.)
She forced awful suffering on herself and family to defend her husband¡s career and their beliefs. All of us who¡ve had the sad experience of a second trimester anomaly can only be horrified that this powerful couple would condemn many other women to likely if not certain death under similar circumstances, and curtail if not entirely eliminate better choices for all of us. The exquisite medical expertise they enjoyed is far more rare in Pennsylvania today, thanks in no small part to anti-choice bullying. 30% of U.S. women have an abortion at some time in their life; if all of them had the courage to be honest about their experiences, our policies would look a lot different, and so would the life chances of the truly vulnerable.
Both these snippets come from http://oursilverribbon.org/blog/?p=188 .