Santorum Now Against Prenatal Testing
You only have the rights I decide you're allowed to have!
One of the key characteristics of this election cycle is that the GOP is not for anything. They have defined themselves as the party of “No” and Rick Santorum is the leader of the pack. No separation of church and State. No premarital sex. No birth control. No abortions. No taxes. No EPA. No FDA. No evolution. And now, no prenatal testing.
Santorum’s problem with amniocentesis (and presumably other forms of testing) is that it can detect genetic defects and other problems early enough for the mother to abort, therefor it should not be covered by insurance. Here, again, we see the black or white extremism of one of the top contenders in the GOP field for the presidency.
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CNN Reports:
“One of the mandates is they require free prenatal testing in every insurance policy in America,” Santorum, a conservative Roman Catholic, told a Christian Alliance luncheon in Columbus. “Why? Because it saves money in health care. Why? Because free prenatal testing ends up in more abortions and therefore less care that has to be done, because we cull the ranks of the disabled in our society.”
So now we’re one step removed from abortion but Santorum still wants to restrict our rights. Smoking cigarettes might lead to a miscarriage. Liberals would like to ban them for indisputably killing one out of every three people but Republicans faint with outrage at the idea. Being in a car accident might lead to a miscarriage. Perhaps we should ban pregnant women from getting into cars? Toxins in the environment can trigger an abortion as well. Yet Mr. Santorum thinks there should be less regulation on industrial pollution. It’s interesting how selective he is about what he opposes.
The reality is that prenatal testing like amniocentesis allows parents to make an informed decision about whether to proceed with a pregnancy. Can the parents afford a special needs child? Will they be able to care for it properly? Remember, Republicans viscerally object to government programs that help people without financial resources. This includes cutting services to, yes, special needs children. This is the Catch 22 of conservative politics. You would be forced to have a child you cannot care for but will receive no help from the government that forced you to have it.
But aside from Santorum’s one track mind, prenatal testing does, actually, serve a vital function aside from determining to terminate a pregnancy. I know this from personal experience.
Several years ago, my wife’s cousin found out very late in her pregnancy that her baby had Anencephaly. The baby had not developed a brain beyond the most rudimentary of functions. Its heart and lungs would pump and breath and the baby would be alive in only the most technical of senses. It would never grow, smile, speak, walk or crawl. It can usually be detected by a sonogram but not always.
Further testing would have revealed it but as it would have been cost the insurance company extra, no testing was done until it was far too late. She had to have a third trimester abortion. I can imagine had she lived in Kansas she would have been threatened and denounced by fanatics who would not have taken the time to learn the details of her suffering. In Rick Santorum’s world, she would have delivered that baby stillborn or watched it die slowly over the course of a few weeks.
Mandated prenatal testing would have saved my wife and I a good deal of grief as well. Our first two pregnancies ended in a miscarriage because there was an easily correctable problem that went undetected. Why? Because our insurance company would not pay for the testing and we couldn’t afford it out of pocket.
I don’t necessarily blame them for the first miscarriage, although if they were less concerned about profit, we might have had the tests and prevented the loss. I certainly blame them for the second which terminated in exactly the same way and could have also been prevented had our insurance authorized the test. If we were rich, we could have just paid for it ourselves, but we weren’t and so we lost the second baby as well. Why? So some insurance company executive can get paid millions?
A message for all of you “free market” lovers out there: A “free market” is never free. There’s always a cost and it’s more often than not measured in human suffering.
So, yes, Mr. Santorum, sometimes prenatal testing leads to abortion. But sometimes it leads to saving the life of the baby or avoiding profound and unnecessary misery. In your rush to strip us all of our rights so as to conform to your Biblical ethics, would you, perhaps, care to factor that into your equation?
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This sort of nut-job in the ministry (now in politics,because there they can do real harm as they can no longer do in the ministry)during the middle ages (more properly called “the dark ages”) wrought vast evil on the populace. They even stopped all human progress for a thousand years. Vast evil, only because they were/are vastly evil themselves. Just as Santorum appears and sounds (because that what he and his kind are.)
The present candidates, and wanted to be candidates, of the republican Party are nuttier than a walnut grove during harvest time. If the Romney nut-type is elected, boy are we in hell’s deepest & darkest pit. Long ago, as a know-it-all kid, I was a republican. Now many years later, I see those republican evil minions of hell for what they truly are.
Why not take a page from the Republican’ts’ playbook and rebrand “abortion” to something more innocuous, something that the sheeple can point to and say, “Oh, thaaaaat’s okaaaay!”
I vote that we rebrand “abortion” as “pro-economic early birth”.
We already know that Republican’ts have exactly the same interest in a living, breathing baby as they do for any other indigent, poor, ill, or otherwise helpless person. Which is to say, absolutely none, unless they can find an excuse for making that person’s life harder and more miserable. THEN they act, and act swiftly, to make that person’s life harder and more miserable so the Republican’ts’ obscenely wealthy masters can have a few more pennies from our pockets.
So, if we rebrand “abortion” as “pro-economic early birth”, not only are we ridding the act of the stigma that “abortion” has been given by the cynically power-hungry, the ignorant, and the sheeple, but we automatically rebrand “abortion doctors” to “early-birth specialist gynecologists”, which enables them to charge the insurance companies more as well, since they are now “specialists”. Whoo.
Just think of the power the Republican’ts and the Greedy Obstructionist Panderers have put into our hands. From the hated “Liberal” now springs rank after rank of “Pro-American Patriots”! From the dreaded “Socialist” blooms the image of “Pro-American Rights” enthusiasts! And from “corruption and greed” we smoothly segue into “Robber Barons and Republican’ts”–oh, wait, we have THAT one already. . .