Santorum: When I was leading the charge on partial birth abortion, several members came forward and said, “Why don’t we just ban all abortions?” Tom Daschle was one of them, if you remember. And Susan Collins, and others. They wanted a health exception, which of course is a phony exception which would make the ban ineffective.
How "phony" are health exceptions? Just
ask him and his wife:
Here’s the Santorums’ description of their second trimester abortion, written by Steve Goldstein, Philadelphia Inquirer, May 4, 1997
Karen was in her 19th week of pregnancy. Husband and wife were in a suburban Virginia office for a routine sonogram when a radiologist told them that the fetus Karen was carrying had a fatal defect and was going to die.
After consulting with specialists, who offered several options including abortion, the Santorums decided on long-shot intrauterine surgery to correct an obstruction of the urinary tract called posterior urethral valve syndrome.
A few days later, rare “bladder shunt” surgery was performed at Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia. The incision in the womb carried a high risk of infection.
Two days later, at home in the Pittsburgh suburb of Verona, Karen Santorum became feverish. Her Philadelphia doctors instructed her to hurry to Pittsburgh’s Magee-Women’s Hospital, which has a unit specializing in high-risk pregnancies.
After examining Karen, who was nearly incoherent with a 105-degree fever, a doctor at Magee led Santorum into the hallway outside her room and said that she had an intrauterine infection and some type of medical intervention was necessary. Unless the source of the infection, the fetus, was removed from Karen’s body, she would likely die.
At minimum, the doctor said, Karen had to be given antibiotics intravenously or she might go into septic shock and die.
The Santorums were at a crossroads.
Once they agreed to use antibiotics, they believed they were committing to delivery of the fetus, which they knew would most likely not survive outside the womb.
Now to be fair, even in her tragic and incoherent state, Magee clung to her anti-abortion beliefs:
The antibiotics brought Karen’s fever down. The doctor suggested a drug to accelerate her labor.
“The cramps were labor, and she was going to get into more active labor,” Santorum said. “Karen said, `We’re not inducing labor, that’s an abortion. No way. That isn’t going to happen. I don’t care what happens.’ ”
As her fever subsided, Karen – a former neonatal intensive-care nurse – asked for something to stop the labor. Her doctors refused, Santorum recalled, citing malpractice concerns.
Santorum said her labor proceeded without having to induce an abortion.
Now I'll leave it to you to decided whether or not what the Santorums did, accepting antibiotics knowing it would lead to the delivery of an unviable fetus (which was going to happen anyways), is any different or better than having an abortion. But the part that really disgusts me is this:
Karen, a soft-spoken red-haired 37-year-old, said that “ultimately” she would have agreed to intervention for the sake of her other children.
“If the physician came to me and said if we don’t deliver your baby in one hour you will be dead, yeah, I would have to do it,” she said. “But for me, it was at the very end. I would never make a decision like that until all other means had been thoroughly exhausted.”
And her husband agrees:
“The doctors said they were talking about a matter of hours or a day or two before risking sepsis and both of them might die,” Santorum said. “Obviously, if it was a choice of whether both Karen and the child are going to die or just the child is going to die, I mean it’s a pretty easy call.”
Yes, wasn't it nice to have that choice? The same choice Santorum would deny anyone else but his wife? When it's his wife, the call is
easy, when it's your wife, sister, daughter, whatever, it's
phony. The particularly ironic part about it, is the Santorums actually made the choice that almost certainly would have led to Karen's death. Karen is only alive today because the Doctors' and their pesky insurers problem with ya' know, doing something that would likely have resulted in her death. Regardless, it's clear that the Santorums do believe in choice, as long as it's theirs and not yours.
Rather than gain any empathy for other women who are faced with the tragedy of carrying an unviable fetus or risk dying due to pregnancy complications, the Santorums believe because Karen survived her horrible ordeal, that all other women in the same situation should be forced to do the same and that is what I find completely repugnant.
coffeetalk makes an interesting argument that I'm conflating health and life of a mother as the same thing and that Santorum and other anti-abortion people do make an exception if the life of the mother is at stake. Perhaps they aren't being as hypocritical as I originally thought, but still I think their personal arbitrary distinctions between what is best and necessary for other people because of their personal, non-medical, beliefs or experience is reprehensible.