Rick Santorum wants healthy babies to die.

 CBS News reported today that Rick Santorum criticized President Obama's health policies requiring medical insurance plans to provide free prenatal screening.

Santorum said, "...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... That, too, is part of Obamacare, another hidden message as to what President Obama thinks of those who are less able than the elites who want to govern our country."

This position is not the least bit new to me.  Since I was a kid, I've been aware of the March of Dimes, which works to fight birth defects - and I've heard the mantra that people are likely to abort babies who they know have defects.  I also know that Santorum himself has a three-year-old daughter who suffers from Trisomy 18, which is usually fatal in much less than three years.

My wife any I are Christians of modest income, living in a small city, doing everything we can to get by.  (In my case, that means full-time work, plus part-time when I can get it.)  We're not the sorts who'd chose abortion ourselves.  In fact, Santorum would probably think we're the "target market" for his campaign messages.

I don't know whether the Santorums' faith led them to entirely opt out of prenatal screening for Trisomy 18, or just to have their daughter regardless of the results.  I do, however, know that Santorum is absolutely "full of it" on this point, because prenatal screening can also save the life of a mother or baby.  In fact, if it weren't for prenatal screening, my daughter wouldn't be alive today.

A tale of two ad-supported ecosystems

Both Google and Facebook have long made most of their money off ads, and given away their services mostly for free.

In Google's case, ads are delivered based on search terms, or based on the content of other web sites where context-sensitive ads are being served.  So they can be served to anyone in a reasonably sensible manner, regardless of whether Google knows anything at all about them.

Facebook, on the other hand, tries to "target" ads based on personal information about their users. I'm sure this works in some cases, but if I had a dollar bill for each time I've been shown a beer ad (I don't drink beer), or a car insurance ad when I didn't have a car, or a "buy a house from this guy" ad for some realtor I've never heard of just because he claims to have an office in my town (oh, and I already have a house)... I'd be a pretty wealthy guy by now.

Now, Facebook is IPO'ing and trying to raise (*bites pinky*) five Billion dollars, based on all that personal user data they have, and all that targeting they can make advertisers believe actually works.  (And maybe it does, in some cases - regardless of how total-FAIL it's been in my experience.)

Another way to look at this, courtesy of "Breakout" on Yahoo Finance, is that Facebook wants to make big bucks off its user data.  Of course, this doesn't in any way benefit the people who give their content to Facebook, thus driving traffic.  This is a different model than Google, which (for example) gives me this blog for free and gives me a cut of the revenue from ads that appear on it.

Needless to say, I'm once again reducing my presence on Facebook - which is now easier than ever, since most of my friends are now on Google's social network, Google+.  And since Facebook wants to make a buck off my data, I'm updating as much of it as possible to be completely bogus, then deleting it.

I know this my actions will not in any way cause Facebook to crumble or falter in the slightest, but as a content creator, I can at least refuse my content to places that want to have it for free and then make money (even indirectly) off it.