Former Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania said Thursday that while a decision by House Republicans to scratch a planned vote on a measure banning abortion after 20 weeks with limited exceptions was understandable if the votes weren’t there, the outcome is still “disappointing.”
“You don’t want to bring up a bill that’s not going to pass, so if the reason the leadership decided to pull it was they were concerned they didn’t have the votes to pass it, that’s a legitimate reason to pull the bill,” Mr. Santorum said at the Family Research Council’s “ProLifeCon” event.
Amid internal divisions, the bill to ban abortions after 20 weeks, with exceptions for pregnancies resulting from rape or incest or to protect the life of the mother, was pulled for the time being, though Republicans vowed to revisit the issue.
Thursday is the annual March for Life, timed with the anniversary of the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision establishing constitutional rights to abortion.
“You can’t argue with the fact that when you look at this baby in the womb that it’s a baby — you can say it’s a blob of tissue; you can call it whatever you want, but it’s a baby and obviously [it’s] a baby from the beginning, but it looks like a baby at 20 weeks,” Mr. Santorum said. “And in a visual world, where emotions are important, the reality sets in, and so I don’t understand why anyone for any reason would oppose a bill that says we can’t kill these little children. And so it’s disappointing in that regard but I hope the leadership is doing their job responsibly to make sure that we don’t have a bad situation [where] we bring up a bill and we lose … that would be the worst thing to have happen. So we’ll wait and see.”
Mr. Santorum, who is weighing another bid for the presidency in 2016, has a tremendous following among social conservatives, but has also spoken frequently about the need for the GOP to do a better job reaching out to blue-collar workers after 2012 GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney’s loss to President Obama.
• David Sherfinski can be reached at dsherfinski@washingtontimes.com.
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