Difference in accounts of Santorum's child: National Review vs. NYT

[MikeWaters]

http://www.nationalreview.com/articl...ity-rich-lowry

Santorum’s wife, Karen — now the mother of seven — was pregnant when the then-Pennsylvania senator was leading the fight in the mid-1990s against partial-birth abortion. The couple learned that the fetus had a small, although usually fatal, defect. Doctors suggested a long-shot procedure that worked, but with risk of infection. Soon, Karen had a 101 temperature on the way to 105.

Karen began to go into labor. On a sonogram, she could see her healthy baby. She knew that if she delivered him now, at just 20 weeks, he wouldn’t live. Delirious with fever, she begged the doctors to stop her labor at the risk of her own life. In the end, she delivered Gabriel Michael, who lived two hours.

“I knew,” she told The New Yorker, “I was going to give birth and I would not hear the baby cry.” A former neonatal nurse, Karen couldn’t bear to send the baby to the morgue. She and Rick stayed in the hospital room with him overnight and then brought him home so their other kids could see their brother before he was buried.

This is where the “controversy” comes in. Liberal Fox News commentator Alan Colmes said the other day that it was “crazy” for the Santorums to bring home the baby, a comment he quickly apologized for. In more judicious language, The New York Times Magazine wrote in a Santorum profile that some would find the Santorums’ decision “discomforting, strange, even ghoulish.” Have these people never heard of a wake?

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/22/ma...pagewanted=all

The childbirth in 1996 was a source of terrible heartbreak -- the couple were told by doctors early in the pregnancy that the baby Karen was carrying had a fatal defect and would survive only for a short time outside the womb. According to Karen Santorum's book, ''Letters to Gabriel: The True Story of Gabriel Michael Santorum,'' she later developed a life-threatening intrauterine infection and a fever that reached nearly 105 degrees. She went into labor when she was 20 weeks pregnant. After resisting at first, she allowed doctors to give her the drug Pitocin to speed the birth. Gabriel lived just two hours.

What happened after the death is a kind of snapshot of a cultural divide. Some would find it discomforting, strange, even ghoulish -- others brave and deeply spiritual. Rick and Karen Santorum would not let the morgue take the corpse of their newborn; they slept that night in the hospital with their lifeless baby between them. The next day, they took him home. ''Your siblings could not have been more excited about you!'' Karen writes in the book, which takes the form of letters to Gabriel, mostly while he is in utero. ''Elizabeth and Johnny held you with so much love and tenderness. Elizabeth proudly announced to everyone as she cuddled you, 'This is my baby brother, Gabriel; he is an angel.' ''

I find it interesting that Lowry neglects to mention the use of pitocin. In the NYT version, she actually allows labor to be sped up. Certainly nothing wrong with that, and it sounds like it was in her best interest with nothing that could be done to save the baby.

One gets the feeling that Lowry is trying to score political points by presenting a "pure" account of the delivery and slamming the "liberal" media, which is better than the Colmes low-blow, but by how much?

I don't have any problem with what the Santorums did. I have no idea what I would personally do, and it seems that the goal of bringing closure to their family was a good thing. They report it had an excellent effect on their children, and that sounds like a wonderful thing. And now it becomes a political football that is tossed around. I guess that's what happens when you inject religion into the public sphere as much as Santorum does. If Santorum were elected, he would quite possibly be the most religious person elected president in memory. Maybe ever.

At some level, it makes Romney, who has actually been a lay clergyman, appear non-religious. That might actually help Romney in some respects.

The one thing you have to admire about Santorum is that he seems to be pretty sincere. And that's exactly the contrast he is going to bring against Romney. "I'm real, he's plastic. He's polished, I'm raw, but I'm the real-deal and I care about you. You can trust me. I'm the scrappy underdog who is going to do right by you." Who knows, this could be a winning formula.

[Tex]

From a political perspective, the journalistic focus on this poor lost child is macabre and inappropriate, not to mention completely irrelevant. I won't waste another character typing about it.

[MikeWaters]

Let's be very clear about something--the death of their child was not a private family matter. It was a family matter, but not private. Why? Because the Santorums chose to make it public. They are unapologetic about doing so. They say that many people have reported to them that their account has affected their lives and caused them to "choose life". They don't have any reason to apologize about it. Has Rick Santorum ever once promulgated the idea that abortion and "life" issues should not be vigorously considered and debated?

[MikeWaters]

this is linked on Drudge:

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/vid...ery_weird.html

Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Eugene Robinson doesn't think voters will be "down" with how Rick Santorum and his wife mourned their stillborn child.

"He's not a little weird, he's really weird," Robinson said of Santorum. "And some of his positions that he has taken are just so weird that I think that some Republicans are off-put. Not everybody is not going to be down, for example, with the story of how he and his wife handled the stillborn child. It was a body that they took home to kind of sleep with it, introduce it to the rest of the family. It's a very weird story."

[Tex]

Originally Posted by MikeWaters

Let's be very clear about something--the death of their child was not a private family matter. It was a family matter, but not private. Why? Because the Santorums chose to make it public. They are unapologetic about doing so. They say that many people have reported to them that their account has affected their lives and caused them to "choose life". They don't have any reason to apologize about it. Has Rick Santorum ever once promulgated the idea that abortion and "life" issues should not be vigorously considered and debated?

I don't know what any of this has to do with people dissecting the account like jackasses, Eugene Robinson included.