why not, i didn’t think anyone with a bit of medical knowledge would think that. there are some on the very fringe of the prolife movement that aren’t very into facts and medical knowledge.
guinastasia, this was the pregnancy that resulted in gabriel michael who lived for 2 hours.
I think this is quite common in some cultures.
**TokyoPlayer **posted about his family’s experience of taking their deceased child home after he passed away straight after birth - the circumstances were not directly the same, in that the child was born at a much later stage, but the principle is similar.
That’s Santorum’s defense, which raises the question of whether Bill Clinton taught him the fine art of definitional quibbling, or whether he taught Bill.
Well, the ability to be that finely technical leans me toward the “he taught Bill” answer to my question.
They didn’t intentionally induce labor or otherwise terminate the pregnancy. That’s kind of the end of the story for me, and I think WhyNot’s post really puts this to bed.
There was no “procedure”. There was no D&C. There was no vacuum extraction. There was no medication given to hasten uterine contractions or to expel the contents of the uterus. (Again, assuming the linked article is accurate.)
There was a surgery to try to correct a congenital defect while the fetus was still in the uterus. Then the surgical site on the fetus got infected, and the infection spread to the mother (or maybe the surgical site on the mother got infected and the infection spread to the fetus, it’s unclear and a difference without distinction). The infection caused uterine contractions. The hospital gave the mother antibiotics to stop the infection.
Now COULD they have given her something to stop the contractions or sewed up the cervix and kept the infected fetus inside her? Possibly, technically, but it wouldn’t have done any good. Had they done that, the infection would probably have killed them both in 24-48 hours. And I don’t mean “probably” like, 50/50…I mean “probably” like “absent a miracle from The Flying Spaghetti Monster…”
All they did was give her antibiotics for her infection and allow nature to take its course and expel the fetus naturally.
Hell, they even DECLINED drugs (pitocin, no doubt) to hasten the labor and get the whole ugly ordeal over with sooner.
Please explain this part to me, 'cause I’m just not getting it. How was taking antibiotics equivalent to aborting the fetus? Remember, antibiotics don’t cause miscarriages or fetal death in a 19 week fetus.
I wish I could agree, but there are lot of very intelligent pro-choice people posting to this thread who seem to think this was an abortion somehow.
Yeah, there was no abortion here, that I can see.
My problem with it isn’t that there was an abortion, because there wasn’t. But they would have had one. They say so. These are people who hide behind the RCC and would deny other women a procedure they felt was within their rights to choose.
The RCC says no, you don’t get to have an abortion to save the woman’s life, and abortion includes hastening delivery of an unviable fetus. The RCC does not allow you to choose between the woman and the fetus. You have to just sort of leave it to God and if God decides both die, well, you both die.
What the Santorums said wasn’t that. They said it would be an easy choice to choose the mother (and so it should be for anyone who isn’t a slack-jawed imbecile) if there had to be a choice made. But by saying that, they are rejecting the RCC position AND the position of the anti-abortion nutters they have signed up with. Which is why I would have hoped they would say, “Oh, so this is what it’s like to be facing a real choice between abortion and the death of the mother and yes, we would choose to save the mother. Gee, let’s back down from some of our unfair and disgusting rhetoric about this sort of situation.”
But they doubled down instead. That’s what’s disgusting. They had an option and they would have taken it despite their God, but they would deny me that option for their God. In fact, they would force me to be a better Catholic than they are.
The bolded area does not agree with what I was taught as a Catholic. It was 30-some years ago, but I was taught that a “certainly unviable” fetus could be removed by any means. It’s the case where the child is saveable, but at the almost certain cost of the Mother’s life that no choice can be made.
I do not believe you were taught correctly. Direct abortion, even of an ectopic pregnancy, is forbidden by the RCC. I’ll lift from Wikipedia since it echoes what I’ve read elsewhere:
I don’t see how this was partial birth abortion. It sounds like a premature delivery before viability.
I thought they were OK with medically necessary treatments that would result in the death of a fetus. So if you had cancer and the chemo would kill the fetus but you culdn’t survive without chemo for 9 months, then you could have the chemo…
That sounds like an objection to the HEALTH exception, not the LIFE exception. The problem that many conservatives have had with the boundaries of the health exception, not the concept of the health exception. So in their infinite wisdom, they just outlaw the whole damn thing and rely on jury nullification to protect the truly meritorious cases.
That is not a direct abortion. The goal is not to destroy the embryo or fetus, but to battle the cancer. For example, if staying pregnant increased a woman’s risk of dying, she would be unable to have an abortion to reduce that risk. If, on the other hand, her uterus were cancerous and going to kill her, she may be permitted to have a hysterectomy thereby indirectly causing the death of the embryo or fetus. You can have “diseased” tissue removed, even if it contains the embryo or fetus. So in an ectopic pregnancy, they are not permitted to excise only the embryo or to inject the area to make the embryo dissolve. They are permitted to remove all or a portion of the Fallopian tube that contains the embryo because the RCC calls that portion “diseased.”
In the case of the Santorums, she would not be permitted to have an abortion to save her life from the infection, nor would she be permitted to induce labor. These are direct abortions, and they are what the Santorums said they would choose to do.
However, if the antibiotic had the foreseen but unintended side effect of causing an abortion, that would/might still be allowed.
Real-World Translation: …they would just outlaw the whole damn thing and rely on prosecutors focusing their entire attention on cases arising amongst the Wrong Sort Of People[tm].
Neither, you’re just letting your personal opinions of Santorum blind you to the facts.
Did they? I missed that part, or you got it from a different article. What I read is:
That’s Karen, not Rick, not “the Santorums”. That’s *Karen *(a former NICU nurse, incidentally, so she knew exactly what was going on the whole time, assuming she was lucid) saying what she would have done had things gone the way they didn’t go. And it sure doesn’t sound like she thinks it would be an easy choice, even an hour from (theoretical) death’s door.
Calling Rick Santorum* a hypocrite (or whatever it that “article” was going for) because of what his *wife *didn’t do but might have done…I mean, that’s pretty low and dishonest. Again, it reminds me of “pro-life”, anti-choice tactics, not pro-choice tactics.
I mean, unless we’re going way old school Catholicism and he’s a bad Catholic for letting his wife have a mind of her own…
*And again, let me reiterate: I loathe Rick Santorum, as a candidate and as a human being. I feel like I need to take a shower after defending him. Ick.
She said she would have chosen herself, and he said it wouldn’t be a difficult choice to save her if both were in danger. That’s where the hypocrisy lies. He said:
It is an easy call. It is, however, a call he would not allow women to make, and it’s a call the RCC does not allow.
AH! There it is, thank you. I literally could not find the quote in the article.
OK, yeah, I see where you’re coming from. I still don’t think that this is the smoking gun the article’s writer does. Seems a pretty tenuous line from A to B, coming from a “what if” place, but okay. Now at least I understand how posters I respect are interpreting it. 
The smoking gun aspect of it, for me, is that these are people who know full well that circumstances can arise that pit the life of a fetus against the life of a woman, and they are saying clearly that they would choose the woman.
And then Rick Santorum argues that it’s all a mirage.
It really does play into the “the only good abortion is my abortion” idea for me. It would be okay if they did it. Not you. Not me. But for them, why, it’s an easy choice.
I just want to shake them and demand to know why they get to make that choice but other people don’t. Why is Mrs. Santorum too good to die that way, but other women don’t matter? Why they could have chosen to do something that would have resulted in immediate and automatic excommunication from the RCC, but it’s other people who are unholy and disgusting.
I suppose if the OP had been called “Santorum’s wife would have had an abortion if she hadn’t miscarried,” then I’d be right there with ya.
But “Santorum: Our Hypothetical Abortion Would Have Been Different, If It Had Happened” just doesn’t have the same ring to it. 
My main purpose here was to refute that what actually happened was an abortion, as both the OP and the linked article claim, and I think that part’s done.
Unless you’re referring to a different quote, he argued that it was a mirage when discussing partial birth abortion.
Two points:
This was not an abortion.
Even if it was, the most extreme anti-abortion members of Congress all support an except to save the life of the mother, including Santorum. The quotes from this thread was an objection to partial birth abortion bills that made exceptions for the life AND HEALTH of the mother. This health exception was disliked by conservatives because in every pregnancy there is some risk of health problems to the mother. It would have been the exception that swallowed the rule.
Rick Santorum has a lot of other baggage. This accusation is unfair.