(via drst)
Rick Santorum on health exceptions on the “partial birth abortion” ban:
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.
Quoted from the Philadelphia Inquirer, regarding his wife’s failed pregnancy in 1997:
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.
“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.”
…
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.”
Note that Karen Santorum did not have an abortion; she had pre-term labor that no one tried to stop, because to do so would ultimately end her life. BUT it is clear that abortion would have become an option if nothing else worked. So…how is this a phony exception? And why would an abortion be okay in his wife’s case, but not for anyone else?
How can someone who has lived through this possibly justify denying women life-saving treatment? Just to say, “Oh, yay! Look at the political points I scored with this extremist piece of legislation!”?