Rick Santorum, prenatal testing, and choice

Last updated on: March 2, 2012 at 9:34 pm by Amy Julia Becker

Rick Santorum, prenatal testing, and choice 2012-03-02T21:34:57-05:00 Amy Julia Becker

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I’m working on an essay about recent developments in the national conversation about prenatal testing. I’m not quite done yet, but I thought you all would appreciate reading the conclusion of Joe Klein’s essay in Time Magazine this week. Joe Klein is a political moderate who tends to vote for Democratic candidates. Not exactly the person you expect to defend Rick Santorum. But in “Rick Santorum’s Inconvenient Truths” (which I WISH I could link to in full, but I can’t, Klein defends Santorum. For those of you who don’t know, Santorum is the father of seven, and his youngest daughter Isabella has Trisomy 18. Nearly all babies with Trisomy 18 are aborted. Klein defends Santorum’s questions about education and about the use of prenatal testing. In conclusion, Klein writes:

I am haunted by the smiling photos I’ve seen of Isabella with her father and mother, brothers and sisters. No doubt she struggles through many of her days–she nearly died a few weeks ago–but she has also been granted three years of unconditional love and the ability to smile and bring joy. Her tenuous survival has given her family a deeper sense of how precious even the frailest of lives are.

All right, I can hear you saying, the Santorum family’s course may be admirable, but shouldn’t we have the right to make our own choices? Yes, I suppose. But I also worry that we’ve become too averse to personal inconvenience as a society–that we’re less rigorous parents than we should be, that we’ve farmed out our responsibilities, especially for the disabled, to the state–and I’m grateful to Santorum for forcing on me the discomfort of having to think about the moral implications of his daughter’s smile.

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