Just when I thought GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum couldn’t impress me as any more extreme, I saw this video on the Huffington Post. His idea of right to life includes not aborting a fetus resulting from rape. Not even if the pregnant woman were his daughter. The woman must “make the best out of a bad situation.” Because that baby is “a gift.” (But “it’s not a matter of religious values.”) Easy for him to say, since it hasn’t happened. But if it did happen, wouldn’t it be his daughter’s decision, not his? I haven’t words for a man who would want, expect, counsel, or force his daughter — or any woman — to carry a rapist’s baby to term if she didn’t want to.
Then interviewer Piers Morgan presses ahead with the next obvious question for all right-to-lifers. How, if you believe so strongly in the right to life, can you support the death penalty? It’s okay, says Santorum glibly, “if there is certainty” of guilt. There seems to be no recognition at all of the obvious inconsistency and utter incongruity in his beliefs. A parasitic blob of cells in a rape victim has an absolute right to life, regardless of its host’s wishes, but a sentient adult human being does not?
How does this man sleep at night?
(Biting my tongue… bite harder… bite down… Ouch! I think I bit it off!)
Next time, curse before you bite your tongue, silly. You need that release.
What a bunch of *%&* !!!
I knew a young man who’s mother after being raped had no choice and she kept this precious gift. She was not able to make the best of the “bad situation” EVER!!! To make a long story short, she became a bitter drunk who never let the boy forget it. The young man became a warm, kind and very funny but lonely kid who committed suicide, after a long night of her brutal words. I wonder to this day if she had the choice, would it have made a difference?
I believe it should be a choice, the man is an idiot!
What a tragic story. I can’t help thinking that of course it would have made a difference. Santorum says something here about how that baby would be the woman’s child and every day of her life she would look at him and know that was her child. I keep thinking, “and every day she’ll look at him and see her rapist’s face.” A pregnancy and an unwanted child can be much worse than the rape itself. Rape is transitory. Parenthood is forever. Parenthood must be the woman’s decision.
I completely agree with your post here, Susan. Your reasoning relative to the death penalty is sound – it is a statistical fact that many innocent people have perished on death row. As to when life begins, it is clearly not at conception. Fetal development is a continuum with no defining margin. A “fetus” at the moment of conception, IMHO, is only life in the potential sense, just as other random combinations of sperm and ova are potential constructs of life during coitus.
I have mixed feelings about the death penalty. But there’s no doubt in my mind that Santorum’s rigid right-to-life stance defies logic. I have no tolerance for flying in the face of logic, reality, and science, especially when the person espousing it wants to inflict it on others.
This man is disgusting. It’s so easy for him to mandate without having to experience the rape, the pregnancy, the birth, raising an unwanted child – all of it – himself.
Of course what do you expect from a man who takes a cold dead baby home so the other young children can see it? Some states call that abuse of a corpse – and arrest them.
I have to stop now before I get totally irate.
No religious fanatics for president – if you need religious guidance, go to church – and you get to pick which one…for now.
Agreed. The man can go preach those ideas all he wants at his church, but not from the Oval Office. Beats me how he can insist “it’s not a matter of religious values” while at the same time saying a pregnant rape victim cannot abort the fetus because it’s a gift from God.
In choosing who would merit constitutional protections, the founders were wise enough to use the word “BORN” in the constitution, and not the word “CONCEIVED.” Going straight to the ultimate legal source isn’t (or shouldn’t be) all that complicated.
Great point! Why isn’t that brought up more often when people like Santorum start spouting their lunacy? That alone should end the discussion.
A possible answer to your closing question:
Ambien.
I’d like to think so. Actually, he has such blind certainty (there’s that word again) about his belief (word of God, after all) that he probably sleeps like a baby, unlike the women with unwanted pregnancies who are agonizing over what to do.