Rick Santorum gets an assist from the Duggar family in Iowa

[Ms. Toad]

24. If they were doing pure spin, they would never have acknowledged

that they would have chosen to induce labor if her life was at risk. They would have spun it entirely as spontaneous labor following an infection, without offering the rest of their thoughts which are much harder to reconcile with the political positions he has taken.

The article is contemporaneous (or at least a lot more so than the ones claiming labor was induced), in a respectable newspaper with several Pullitzer prizes to its name - that seems reasonably reliable to me. I haven't seen any contemporaneous reports that labor was induced (the ones I have seen have all been written recently). FWIW, it is also consistent with my personal experience with families with similar beliefs.

The reasoning of the families I have spoken with (which took me a while to wrap my brain around) is that - generally - carrying to term is best. If that isn't possible because it would either kill the mother or death would be extraordinarily painful for the child, inducing labor is a moral second choice, with a range after birth from active intervention to save the child's life to letting nature take its course. At 16 weeks (particularly - in the cases I am familiar with ) birth is almost universally - but not inevitably fatal. A medical abortion, on the other hand, guarantees fetal death - and that is where they generally draw the line.

It is not dissimilar to end of life choices, if you think about it, with some people drawing a sharp line between active euthanasia and the rest of the spectrum (which includes actively prolonging life on one end through (on the other end) withholding all but comfort care, perhaps even administering doses of painkillers that might result in death - but stopping short of actively administering a dose that is guaranteed to be fatal).

I'm not trying to justify or reconcile Santorum's policy positions with the personal decisions he and his wife made - just trying to shed a little light on the personal thinking because my voluneer work puts me in a position to have spoken with a number of people with similar beliefs, facing (or who had faced) similar decisions - and the report in the Inquirer is entirely consistent with those other families.