Rick Santorum wants you to procreate (Gage Skidmore)
Rick Santorum wants you to believe that he's had a
"consistent record" on the fact that women have a right to access to birth control.
Not so fast, Ricky. Ed Kilgore makes an excellent point. Santorum has signed on to the radical Personhood Pledge, Personhood USA's pledge to support and promote both state and federal "personhood" laws. Those laws would declare any fertilized egg a person with full legal rights.
Here's where birth control comes in: Many forms of birth control, including the Pill and IUD's would fall under the law's purview. Any method that could prevent a fertilized egg from implanting in the uterus—the medical definition of a viable pregnancy—would be an abortifacient under the law. It would also ban in vitro fertilization. It could also kill women.
Then there are potentially fatal accidents of nature, in which the egg, instead of proceeding to the uterus, becomes stuck in one of the fallopian tubes in what is called an ectopic pregnancy. The embryo can never develop into a live birth and the ectopic pregnancy must be ended or the tube will rupture and the woman will die. Before there were blood tests to reveal the failure of an egg to implant normally, most women did die from ectopic pregnancy. One of the obvious dangers of this amendment would be the prosecution of doctors for performing a standard life-saving procedure. We are talking here about a medical measure to save the life of a real person, not of a group of cells that can never become a person because nature has made an error.
Not that that would deter Santorum, or any other politician who would sign on to this kind of pledge. It's been very well established that the life of the woman becomes meaningless at the point a sperm finds an egg.
Santorum not only has not consistently recognized a woman's right to access to contraception: He's pledged to take it away.