The Baby Rick Santorum Would Have Killed

GOP Presidential hopeful Rick Santorum made waves recently when he came out against requiring insurers to cover prenatal testing. He singled out amniocentesis as a procedure which, in his view, was being used as a precursor to abortion and which insurance companies should not be required (as they are under the ACA) to cover.

Rick Santorum's policy would have killed Sarah Fister Gale's daughter.

Gale was six months into an otherwise normal pregnancy when two successive blood tests turned up abnormal. "Rather than turning to my local politician for prenatal advice, I followed the guidance of my obstetrician, who sent me to a perinatologist, who recommended I have an amniocentesis."

And it's a good thing she did. Gale's daughter was diagnosed via amniocentesis with Rh negative disease, a disorder which occurs when the fetus' blood is positive type but the mother's is negative. The mothers' immune system attacks the baby's blood cells, preventing them from developing. Absent treatment, the baby is normally carried to term but then dies shortly after birth.

Amniocentesis is very expensive. If it wasn't covered by insurance, Gale probably couldn't have gotten the test. And her baby would probably be dead. That, in turn, would be a direct result of Santorum deciding that his moral code takes precedence over doctor's practicing medicine.

If Rick Santorum had his way, I wouldn’t have been able to get that test, and she most likely would have died. Because according to him, tests that give parents vital information about the health of their unborn children are morally wrong. Though he has no medical training, and no business commenting on the medical decisions that women and their doctors make, he argues that such tests shouldn’t be provided, or that employers at least should be allowed to opt out of paying for them on “moral grounds.”
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In the Catholic church where I was raised, pride, arrogance and an overinflated sense of oneself were considered sins. But in Rick Santorum’s world they are virtues, and they make up the foundation from which he proclaims how other people should live their lives.

In 2008, the Archbishop of Denver said that for a Catholic to justify a vote for a pro-choice politician, they must have a reason of the sort "we will be able to explain, with a clean heart, to the victims of abortion when we meet them face to face in the next life - which we most certainly will." One wonders if Mr. Santorum has a similar reason compelling enough for him to justify a campaign which would see children like Ms. Gale's dead.