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.
Santorum has repulsive standards. But the policies of St Ron Paul, He Who Drinketh the Milk that Is Raw, and Verily verily verily, DOTH NOT GETTITH ILL TO HIS STOMACH, are not much better.
you sure do love homogenization.
I work in the health care system. I support the public health system, and the processes that, over the last 140 years, have been developed to save lives, especially of children.
If Paul were elected, you would see an assault on the vaccination system, because pasteurization of milk and vaccination of children are EXACTLY the same process. If you support raw milk, you oppose vaccination. And that way leads to enormous numbers of dead kids.
“If you support raw milk, you oppose vaccination. And that way leads to enormous numbers of dead kids.”
Destroying the natural enzymes in milk and pulverizing the fat molecules so that it doesn’t decompose naturally is in no way similar to opposing injecting kids with weakened or dead microorganisms in order to boost immunity. These absolutist litmus tests are absurd and insulting.
Why are you so hung up on the raw milk thing? To me that is one of his least reprehensible ideas. An ex-girlfriend of mine and I had a cow-share for a year, and it was great.
I feel like it’s getting to the point where we should just put you and AG in the Thunderdome and let you settle it there instead of having you guys continue to Ron Paul up the comments in all these non-Ron Paul threads.
In fact, I thought that this was such a good idea…
Ron Paul Thunderdome
Point taken – thanks for your suggestion – LOL.
This is the funniest, most clever thing I’ve seen all day. Thanks!
p.s. I hope people actually find it and duke it out.
Why am I hung up on raw milk? Because he is a physician, and raw milk is not safe. When the raw milk is taken from the cow on your own farm, no problem. My mom grew up on a farm, and drank plenty of milk from her cow, so this is not the issue.
The issue is public health. What works for a single farm with a single family or 2 families or a small number is very unlikely to work with a mass population. The problem with raw milk is that, in the population, it is unsafe. As you move from the farm where you pick up the milk yourself to the mass production, it becomes more and more unsafe.
Remember that pasteurization was developed to solve a problem – the safety of the product. The product, raw milk, is inherently unsafe. The CORE of libertarianism is DON’T REGULATE, and this is a disaster with public health. Raw milk is something that a physician should not be promoting, yet he does promote it. It means, essentially, that he is a very bad physician. In literature, it is the fatal character defect that gets you, or in poker, it is the tic of the eyelid every time the player gets the good hand.
Raw milk is the tell. It tells me that, for Paul, his lunacy about regulation is more important than public health. And that means that, as a doctor, he’s a piece of crap.
Raw milk can be safe – it just puts more onus on the consumer to weigh the risks.
I’m not saying that all milk should be raw. I don’t think raw milk should be offered in supermarkets, for example. But the hoops that have to be gone through to obtain it in many states are also ridiculous.
When we bought our cow share, we first went and met the farmer, saw the cows, saw the farm, and then we decided to do it. We’re drinking the same milk the farmer and his family are drinking. Why should that be illegal?
I don’t see any reason to prevent an informed consumer from making that decision for themselves, while also heavily regulating mass produced milk that is not sold direct from farmers.
Whoops, I’m breaking my own rule here – maybe we should take this to the Thunderdome.
However, I will not agree that I am off topic. The topic is “Santorum’s position on family issues”. My comment is “Other lunatics in the GOP field, like Ron Paul, are no different.” I am not hijacking the thread.
Is the topic really about Santorum’s position on family values? Because I don’t really think that’s the topic I meant to raise.
Dude, I grew up on raw milk from a farm down the road. Homemade butter too. Just because modern industry can’t be bothered with the proper sanitation doesn’t mean it can’t be done safely.
The point is NOT that it cannot be done. It can be done. The point is that the likelihood of a problematic batch of raw milk is much higher. Eventually, you will have a public health disaster, where some idiot will feed raw milk formula to a baby with an underdeveloped immune system, or someone with a compromised immune system will believe the raw milk nonsense and get very ill.
With a population, public health processes avoid harm. For Paul and the libertarian wacks, he doesn’t believe that the public health process is a good one. He believes in the stupidity of the Myth of the Lone Frontiersman.
He is a physician. Physicians should support public health, and should not make stupid suggestions. There is no difference between his promotion of raw milk and Andrew Wakefield’s scare tactics about vaccines, which have killed many children already. It is irresponsible, it is unprofessional, and it is insanely stupid.
It is a tell. It means that he values his “freedom” ideas over a policy that protects children and persons with compromised immune systems. As such, I believe that is a single part of his insane agenda which shows that the entire thing is crap.
I think it’s more a matter of mass industry cutting corners at every opportunity, at any expense. I remember when it used to be safe to each spinach salads and peanut butter sandwiches, but every year there’s how many e. coli outbreaks? If my doctor tells me eating raw vegetables is healthy, is that a stupid suggestion?
I can go to the store right now and buy cheese made from raw milk imported from France (you can’t, it’s illegal in the states). That’s a large-scale operation and it doesn’t result in health disasters in France every year.
It can be done, and done safely. The will is lacking, is all.
We live in a peculiar era where our privacy seems to be more of a target than a right. Your thoughts give good argument to the bizarre perspective that corp’s, who Romney tells us are people too, have the intimacy of their operations not only guarded but declared protected whilst the intimacy of a couple’s most sacred life is declared fair game.
I had to put on a tricorn!
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.
I’m not sure about that, especially since Santorum is such a creep. But what do you expect from the corporate media? And yes, Sully’s former hangout is part of the corporate media. As you said, Santorum is a supreme hypocrite. Still, there are plenty of other things to go after Santorum on. And I haven’t actually heard many, if any, liberals/progressives/Democrats go after The Frothy One on this.
Totally agree, and I have been through these circumstances.
Ditto. Though I would note that Santorum has already politicized it by publicizing his actions, and that Booman buys into his argument by calling it a “baby controversy” rather than a “fetus controversy.”
Yes. 1) this is a deeply personal matter, and one to be treated delicately despite Santorum’s decision to publicize it.
2) It would be impossible or at best inhuman to impose a burden of proof that any terminated pregnancy occurred under approved circumstances.
However, did you know that the fetus in question was effectively aborted in a procedure that Santorum would ostensibly outlaw if he had the choice? There’s an extensive interview from 2004 in which he plainly states that his wife’s pregnancy came to a point at which they could elect to either lose the baby or lose the baby and the mother. They chose to administer oxytocin in order to induce labor; one could argue that at 20 weeks this procedure closely resembles partial-birth abortion. But regardless of method, Santorum would not allow other parents the choice of abortion in order to save the mother’s life, even though they chose this for themselves. That hypocrisy deserves all the attention that can be brought to bear.
They used pitocin.
Same thing, I guess. But to be more specific…
people who make outrageous statements should be held accountable. And since Santorum DOES hold a pro-life stance that would indeed lead to forensic vagina investigations for every miscarriage, maybe someone SHOULD demand “proof that they were blameless for the loss of their baby Gabriel”.
if they’re innocent, they have nothing to hide.
Miscarriage is extremely common. It seems like this is not well understood because of the taboo around it. I’ve seen it said that more than half of all conceptions end in miscarriage, but only like 20% of those get noticed because most happen so early in the pregnancy, like in the first three weeks. If miscarriage only happened in one in a hundred conceptions than you could perhaps plausibly talk about an apparatus for distinguishing miscarriage from induced abortion. When perhaps most women of reproductive age experience a miscarriage at some point, you’re basically talking about criminalizing women in general, with like a permanent police presence in every woman’s uterus.
Exactly, BooMan. If you want to ban abortion, that means you want to create the Uterus Police. “Ma’am, we’d like to ask you a few questions, if you’re feeling up to it.”
That way lies madness.
Consider: the police have the constitutional right to enter, to search, to detain if they have a “reasonable suspicion” that there is an imminent threat to human life – the doctrine that allows them to run into a house if they hear someone screaming without first getting a warrant. What does that mean in terms of women and doctors?
I’ve already come under fire from pro-choicers for bringing this up because it “wasn’t an abortion, it was a miscarriage…and it’s unspeakably crass to bash him with it.”
No, sorry, Santorum and his wife do not get a pass. They not only made this issue public, making it fair game for attack, but they use it every chance they can to show why they’re pro-life.
The debate here about whether Mrs. Santorum had an abortion or a miscarriage is really a red herring argument around how medically adherent you want to be about your terminology. In truth, the semantics don’t matter. Whether it’s classified as an abortion or a miscarriage, doctors still provided life-saving medical intervention to hasten the end of her pregnancy — the very same life-saving medical intervention the Santorums would seek to outlaw now.
The fact is that the Santorums do not want to give other women the same choices that they were given. And that is relevant, and it should be brought up.
Good points here. But in most of the world where abortion is still outlawed, and even in the US before Roe v. Wade, spontaneous miscarriages are not, and were not, crime scenes. So that might be stretching the argument a bit too much.
It is possible and consistent, and I know Santorum doesn’t hold this view and deserves no slack on this issue, to have no right to an abortion and still not face any criminal or other sanctions for having one. To the extent that rights declare moral values of a society instead of just minimum standards for individual behavior, the right to an abortion is always going to be a highly contested space and a wedge issue. In Catholic societies which don’t have the same concepts of rights-based standards for individual behavior — France for example, there is much less controversy over laws allowing for women to obtain abortions, or even just a lack of implementation of laws which nominally outlaw it as in Latin America than there is here or in other English-speaking countries with large anti-abortion constituencies such as Ireland.
I oppose criminalizing abortion, but I could never come around to the idea that anyone has a specific right to an abortion over and above rights to normal health care procedures. People have a right to professional health care in modern urban societies and we also have rights to privacy, and I and many others who don’t support abortion can support laws which provide for abortion under those rights, but it becomes the wedge issue that Republicans want it to become when it gets framed as a right to have an abortion.