Are Baby Santorum Attacks the 2012 Version of Trig Palin?

A new frontier for political attacks is being hatched from the liberal left media types. Don't approve of how a family deals with the handicap or death of a newborn child? Mock it.

Recently Alan Colmes, a Fox News Channel contributor, mocked Rick Santorum and his wife, Karen, because of a decision on how they dealt with the death of their two hour old infant son as a family. Colmes said the actions of the Santorums proved that Rick Santorum was "crazy".

The segment was pegged to Santorum’s polling surge in Iowa, which Colmes argued wouldn’t last “once they get a load of some of the crazy things he’s said and done, like taking his two-hour-old baby who died after childbirth and played with it for a couple hours so his other children would know that the child was real…”

Rich Lowry, from the National Review, did not let such hideous talk go unchecked. Colmes was angered that he was not allowed to get away with such an attack on a socially conservative family with devout religious beliefs. Colmes later apologized.

Next up for the attack was liberal columnist Gene Robinson. On a liberal host's MSNBC's evening show, Robinson went on the Santorum-is-weird rampage.

Here is one account of the nasty attack:

“Some of his positions he’s taken are just so weird,” he continued, “that I think some Republicans are going to be off-put. Not everybody is going to be down, for example, with the story of how he and his wife handled the stillborn child whose body they took home to kind of sleep with and introduce to the rest of the family. It’s a very weird story.”

To clarify, the Santorum’s baby was not “stillborn,” but rather, died two hours after being born. Here’s what happened:


The childbirth in 1996 was a source of terrible heartbreak — the couple were told by doctors early in the pregnancy that the baby Karen was carrying had a fatal defect and would survive only for a short time outside the womb. According to Karen Santorum’s book, ”Letters to Gabriel: The True Story of Gabriel Michael Santorum,” she later developed a life-threatening intrauterine infection and a fever that reached nearly 105 degrees. She went into labor when she was 20 weeks pregnant. After resisting at first, she allowed doctors to give her the drug Pitocin to speed the birth. Gabriel lived just two hours.

What happened after the death is a kind of snapshot of a cultural divide. Some would find it discomforting, strange, even ghoulish — others brave and deeply spiritual. Rick and Karen Santorum would not let the morgue take the corpse of their newborn; they slept that night in the hospital with their lifeless baby between them. The next day, they took him home. ”Your siblings could not have been more excited about you!” Karen writes in the book, which takes the form of letters to Gabriel, mostly while he is in utero. ”Elizabeth and Johnny held you with so much love and tenderness. Elizabeth proudly announced to everyone as she cuddled you, ‘This is my baby brother, Gabriel; he is an angel.’ ”

As I’ve said before, the fact that Karen Santorum publicized the event means that, to some extent, it is an appropriate subject for public discussion. For example, the notion that Gabriel’s story is relevant to the abortion rights debate is something that can be legitimately challenged, but even then, it should be handled in a delicate, respectful manner. I have heard liberals mock the Santorums’ expression of grief cruelly in the past, and while Eugene Robinson wasn’t necessarily cruel, there’s something seriously wrong with his premise.

Robinson did a mea culpa on the morning chat show on MSNBC Friday morning. The shows hosts apologized for asking Robinson about it. Yes, apologized for asking Robinson about such a hideous attack.

This conjures up the attacks on Sarah Palin for the left in 2008 for having the audacity to give birth to a child whom she knew would be mentally challenged. Then, the left went off the deep end and tried over and over to prove a conspiracy theory that baby Trig Palin was actually the son of the eldest Palin daughter, Bristol.

The attacks on the sanity of the Santorum family must stop. How one family grieves the death of an infant son is not the business of others, especially a liberal media desperate to re-elect Barack Obama. Death and grieving is deeply personal and individuals go through the process differently. For the record, for Colmes to equate bringing the baby's body home for his siblings to say good-bye to him is not "playing" with him. Some experts in the grieving process even encourage family members to say good-bye to the dead child. Would I have made the same decisions as the Santorums did? No. But, that is their decision in their time of grief.

Making the death of an infant into a political attack - saying Santorum is crazy or weird and therefore not acceptable to be president - is beyond the pale. It is past time for people on both sides to speak up and demand a stop to it all.