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.


Before my daughter was conceived, we had a "false pregnancy," "chemical pregnancy" or "blighted ovum" - whatever you want to call it.  Only an amniotic sac developed, with nothing in it.  This was intensely painful for my wife, both physically and emotionally, and due to bureaucracy, she wasn't even covered by my health insurance at the time.  We had to pay out of pocket to see a gynecologist at a community clinic, who helped us with medicine and medical procedures - the same kinds of things used for the abortions Santorum thinks should be outlawed, except in our case, involving no fetus.

By the time our daughter was conceived, we thankfully had good medical insurance.  Everything seemed to be going fine (if you call morning sickness, migraines and everything else my wife had to suffer through), until week 18.  Our insurance plan does a 3-D ultrasound at that point, and they check everything about the baby - and the mom.  We had to fly 200 miles to the big city for this.  Happily, the perinatologist told us that the baby was a girl, and that everything about her looked absolutely perfect.  The bad news was that my wife's anatomy was such that she would almost certainly lose the pregnancy in a matter of weeks, without intervention.  Now, this doesn't count as a "birth defect" - everybody's unique, and people's insides vary, sometimes in ways that can make it easier or harder to carry a baby to term.

This was a bit of a surprise to everyone - especially the doctors.  You see, most insurance plans don't go to the trouble of doing a 3-D ultrasound and checking the mom at 18 weeks, if it's her first pregnancy.  When someone miscarries midway through an otherwise healthy pregnancy, then they check, and they take precautions the next time around - but in the meantime, a healthy baby has been lost, and the mom has to deal with the physical and emotional pain of a miscarriage.  Even our insurance plan had only recently started screening for these things.  So the specialist - one of only a few in his specialty in the state - hadn't ever seen a mom with this condition on her first pregnancy, early enough to do anything about it, in his entire career.

I should note here that mid-pregnancy miscarriages aren't some vanishingly uncommon thing.  Lots of women have lost lots of otherwise healthy pregnancies that way.  And thanks to modern medicine there are even some things that can be treated through surgery on the fetus in utero, like urinary tract blockages and spin bifida - but only if they're caught by prenatal screening.  So these efforts to screen for treatable conditions, as well as variations in the mom's anatomy that increase the risk of miscarriage are saving babies' lives.

They gave us a week to consider the options.  Do nothing?  Intervene medicinally?  Intervene surgically?  We asked them to do everything they could do to save the pregnancy.  A week later, the perinatologist came out after performing surgery on my wife, and told me that by the time they got her into surgery, she had already started to dilate, and the amniotic sac was bulging out.  So a relatively routine procedure had turned into an "emergency" one, but they had done everything they could, as best as they could, and at least for the time begin, our daughter was staying put.  And there was no chance my wife's pregnancy would have lasted more than another week or two, if they hadn't acted.

A few days later, they sent us home with orders for my wife to be on bed rest for the remainder of her pregnancy, except for seeing her doctor.  They told us up front that since this was her first pregnancy, and they'd never caught one like this before, they had no data points, and couldn't tell us statistically how long she was likely to maintain the pregnancy, but that clearly, the longer, the better.  They told us that they wouldn't try to resuscitate a baby born before 24 weeks, that they'd fly her to the big-city hospital with a neonatal intensive care unit if it was before 35 weeks, and that if she didn't go into labor, they wouldn't undo what they had done surgically until 36 weeks.

So we tried to make it to 24 weeks, and we did.  My wife had to endure weekly shots to help prevent her from going into labor.  We tried to make it to 28 weeks, then 32, then 35... and we did.  A few days before 36 weeks, she started having more serious labor, the surgery was undone, and at 36 weeks to the day, after seventeen weeks of bed rest (and shots) by my long-suffering wife, our daughter was delivered - coincidentally, by the same doctor who had helped us with the false pregnancy before.  Everyone involved generally describes her either as miraculous, or having beat some serious odds.

There it is, then - the practice of pre-natal screening that Santorum attacks as part of an anti-Biblical health-care system and claims just leads to more abortions, saved the life of my daughter.  In fact, thanks to the legality and wide-spread availability of both pre-natal screening and medicines and techniques that are used in abortions but have uses beyond them, both my wife and my daughter are today healthier, in less pain, and more alive than they would be if Santorum got his way.

So, Mr. Santorum, why do you think my daughter should have died?