EXCLUSIVE: Rick Santorum on fighting for life, politically and personally

In a new Live Action Exclusive video interview, former Senator Rick Santorum — also an author and political commentator — spoke about his life, from serving in the Senate to becoming the father of a child with special needs.

Key Takeaways:

• Santorum served in the Senate from 1995 - 2007 representing Pennsylvania.

• He was known as a pro-life cultural conservative during his time in office.

• Santorum helped lead the fight to ban D&X (partial-birth) abortion.

• He is the father of eight children, one who passed away after being born prematurely, and another who has Trisomy 18.

Rick Santorum’s Most Courageous Fight: From Congress to Raising a Special Needs Child

The Backstory:

Santorum, in an exclusive interview with Live Action's Sami Parker, called himself the "accidental public official," as political office didn't initially seem to be part of his plans:

It was 1990, 35 years ago. I was a young guy. I already lived in the community for a little bit.I'd just gotten married, and yet I just didn't think that the person representing me was representing my values, and I thought he needed an opponent. So I went out and ran.

Just to give you an idea, when I won that night, the Wall Street Journal reported the next morning in their paper that the... Associated Press reported that Doug Wahlgren, the guy I beat, lost in the 18th Congressional District of Pennsylvania, but they didn't say who won. So the Wall Street Journal called the Republican National Congressional Committee — the campaign committee for the House of Republicans — and they said, 'Hey, we want the name of the guy who won in the district,' and they didn't have my name.

Santorum won because of a strong grassroots campaign and was reelected again despite a redistricting effort that eliminated his seat. Initially, he served in the House of Representatives before running for a seat in the Senate, where he eventually served the bulk of his career.

Santorum said that while he had always been pro-life, he wasn't particularly active in his convictions at first until he grew stronger in his pro-life beliefs.

"The typical pro-lifer is someone who votes pro-life and keeps their mouth shut. That's the safe way to be a pro-lifer," he told Parker. "No one's going to bother you in the media. No one's going to go out and hang you in effigy if you simply vote pro-life. They're going to go after you if you actually try to do something to change things, if you actually try to move the American public in a different direction."

The Details:

The Fight Against 'Partial-Birth' Abortion

Santorum's most notable effort to make a difference came when he fought to ban the violent D&X, or "partial-birth," abortion procedure. The D&X, or dilation and extraction, procedure involves inducing birth and delivering the baby's body feet first; the baby is fully delivered except for the head, and the abortionist then creates a hole in the baby in the back of the neck with scissors. Then the abortionist inserts a catheter in the hole to suction out the baby's brain.

The procedure is horrific, and is committed later in pregnancy.

When a bill was first introduced to outlaw the barbaric procedure, Santorum thought it would be a slam-dunk. But pro-abortion senators began lobbying against it. The first effort to ban it managed to pass Congress, but President Bill Clinton vetoed it, causing Santorum to realize he needed to take further action:

It was almost like everybody took a step back, and here I was standing there. That's how it felt, and I just felt like I had to do it, and I said, yeah, here I am, Lord, choose me, and that changed my life. That moment changed my life, because from that point forward, I was pretty much the voice of the pro-life movement for the Senate for the next 10 years, and... we ended up fighting partial birth.

We lost President Clinton's veto override by a couple of votes — 1998, same thing. Then the court struck down a state statute, but we got a new court, and then we introduced it again in 2002, and we passed it when President Bush signed it, and it's now the law of the land.

The Fight to Save Their Son

In addition to his political career, Santorum has become well-known for his personal life, too.

He and his wife have seven children together, as well as one baby boy who passed away after being born prematurely in 1996.

We're expecting our fourth child, and she's [Santorum's wife, Karen] almost 20 weeks. We have a sonogram later this week.... We have all the kids there. Everybody's real excited. The sonographer goes over, and looks at my wife and says, 'Your son has a fatal defect and is going to die.'

Obviously, a mess — kids crying, boys crying. I'm trying to get everybody out of there. I get them in the car, start driving, and I just start crying. I had to pull over. Because it finally hit me, instead of just managing, getting kids out of there and managing people, I said, "I'm going to do everything. We got to do everything I can to save this child." In fact, we did.

We had an experimental surgery done... to fix the problem in utero — intrauterine surgery. According to the doctors, it worked, which is amazing.

Three days later, she got an infection. The placenta, everything, was infected because of the surgery. She went into labor and delivered our little boy at 22 weeks. He was born alive. I baptized him at three o'clock in the morning at the hospital and held him.

My wife and I held him for the two hours of his life. It was a crushing blow.

I was pretty mad at God, because here I am, a guy who's on my journey of faith... making it sort of the center, stepping out, taking risks, doing things. God's answer is, "I'm going to take your son."

With the help of his family, Santorum said he was able to recover from the loss, with his wife publishing a book containing the diary entries she had written for her son: "Letters to Gabriel." Santorum said it has helped other parents in their situation to choose life.

The Fighter Named Bella

Later, after Santorum left the Senate, he and his wife experienced several miscarriages before she they conceived their daughter, Bella, who has Trisomy 18. Children with Trisomy 18 have, until recently, been labeled as "incompatible with life," and therefore, have often received no medical care to enable them to survive. When children with Trisomy 18 receive the medical care they need, however, they can and do survive.

Yet the Santorums, like countless other families, were told Bella would die:

They sent her home on hospice and said... just wait, and she will get a cold or she'll aspirate or she'll do something, and she'll die. And my wife, of course, was mama bear. That wasn't going to happen.

And my wife was a nurse, a NICU nurse, actually, in her younger years. And so... she really focused on how we're going to keep this baby alive.... And they sent us home on hospice.

Santorum said they visited the pediatrician when Bella was two weeks old and discovered Bella had been prescribed morphine by hospice — but wasn't to help her calm down if she experienced respiratory distress. Santorum said the pediatrician told them, "This dose will kill her... this wasn't to comfort her. This was to end her."

Santorum added, "And so, we canceled hospice and said, 'We're not going to wait for her to die. We're going to celebrate her life every day.' And we used to have birthday parties every week, and then every month. And now she's 17."

Watch Santorum's entire interview with Parker here: Rick Santorum’s Most Courageous Fight: From Congress to Raising a Special Needs Child