In general, people who criticize the Santorum family for bringing their stillborn baby home to meet the kids are going to look worse than the family they are criticizing. The gruesome facts of this case don’t matter. If you’re envisioning a fully-formed baby, don’t. If you’ve ever had a 20-week ultrasound where the doctor either found or did not find a penis, then you know what got brought home for the kids. Instead of a printout, something far more disturbing was distributed. But I am going to be savagely honest about this both for the critics and for the Santorums. The loss of a pregnancy at any stage of development is (or should be) the most intensely private thing that can possibly happen. It’s so private, in fact, that I could never discuss my experiences beyond merely saying that I’ve had them. I’ve had them, and I learned one thing above all from the experiences. No one has the right, not even your closest loved ones, to inquire into the circumstances or details of your personal tragedy. I can think of nothing crueler than to ask questions about why a pregnancy was lost. If you’ve experienced a spontaneous abortion or an ectopic pregnancy, you will understand the need for a right to privacy. Nothing else could make that case for you in such a compelling and convincing manner.
If, like the Santorums, you choose to share the details with the world, you are forfeiting your right to privacy, but you’re still entitled to some decency. But let’s envision a world in which you don’t have the right to end a pregnancy even in the first trimester. A spontaneous miscarriage would be a potential crime scene. If it occurred because of a genetic disorder, you’d have to have that certified. If the cause was unknown, you’d have to certify that. You’d have to prove you didn’t resort to any herbal or other techniques for inducing miscarriage. If you fell down the stairs, you’d have to testify that it was an accident.
How would the Santorums feel if we responded to their heart-wrenching experience by demanding proof that they were blameless for the loss of their baby Gabriel?
If you’ve had the experience, or known anyone who has had the experience, of losing a wanted pregnancy, then you know that nothing more indecent and wrong could conceivably be done than to even raise the issue of culpability. That is the very core of the justification for a right to privacy concerning reproductive rights.
You will hear people pass judgment on couples who elect to terminate a pregnancy when there appears to be nothing wrong with the fetus and no economic reason why they couldn’t care for the baby. Maybe you think that is a morally reprehensible thing to do. But you could never devise a system that could differentiate that decision from what happened to the Santorums without investigators. You would need investigators to pore over sonograms and genetic samples and the mother’s health charts to decide whether she made a legally permissible decision.
This is why the legality of abortion is inseparable from the right to privacy. Even a society that held that abortion is morally wrong, would have to also hold that putting any burden on parents who have suffered a miscarriage is even more wrong. What’s sad is that the Santorums didn’t learn this lesson from their tragedy. What they did instead was to make their tragedy as public as possible and use their experience as a way to advocate for the mistreatment of others in their same situation.
How we balance the rights of a woman and the rights of a fetus is morally complicated, and different people will come to different conclusions. But, legally, anyone who has gone through what the Santorums went through, should be able to agree that the state has no legitimate role in making any inquiries of any kind.
