Letters From Life's Other Side
On Sept. 26, 1996, Karen Santorum, pregnant with her fourth child, felt a chill run down her spine. She was in the playroom of her suburban Virginia house reading to her three toddlers and watching the U.S. Senate debate on partial-birth abortion on TV. Karen, who is married to Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.), leader of the fight to ban the procedure, couldn't believe what she was hearing.
One "pro-choice" member even argued that the Senate had no right to consider overriding President Clinton's veto of a bill banning the procedure. None of the males in the Senate could become pregnant, the speaker said, so they would never themselves be confronted with "the trauma that is represented by the issue of late-term abortion." Abortion was an issue, the argument went, that could never "touch their lives."
Perhaps sensing the ordeal in store for her own family, Karen, now 38, a former neonatal intensive-care nurse with a law degree, burst into tears. She was scheduled for a sonogram the next week, and she was worried because, although nearly four months pregnant, she had felt no movement in her womb. Her intuition told her that something was wrong.
A week after she had watched the debate, Karen's fears were confirmed. A doctor brusquely informed her that her son suffered from a fatal condition and that, at most, he might survive a few hours after birth. The Santorums were urged to end the troubling pregnancy. But for them this was never an option. "Our son was a real person for us from the moment we knew we were pregnant," Karen told Our Sunday Visitor recently.
The spiritual journal of the Santorums' fateful pregnancy is recorded in the recently published "Letters from Gabriel" (CCC of America, $15).
"Letters to Gabriel" is the story of the Santorums' fight for their son's life and how they dealt with his death, only two hours after he was born. It is an amazingly vivid book, almost too raw in several places, that made Karen almost as prominent as Rick in the movement to end partial-birth abortion. "This book is a celebration of my son's life," Karen said.
"Letters to Gabriel," which has a forward written by Mother Teresa shortly before her death, is based primarily on letters that Karen wrote to her son. She began the letters in July, when she learned she was pregnant again, and they end a year after Gabriel's funeral.
"I've received thousands of letters," Karen said. "One of the saddest is from a woman whose doctors pushed her to have an abortion. It's the saddest letter. She lives with more pain than you can imagine. My heart aches for her, and she needs to know that we have a loving God."
She has also heard from people who have disabilities. "Our world does so much to make people with defects feel unwanted," she said. "We live in such a perfectionist world that it's frightening. It was interesting for me to read the partial-birth debate as a nurse. What some senators were saying was that any birth defect is grounds for an abortion. One argued that blindness is enough to justify an abortion.
"It frightens me that any child could be classified as too burdensome to live," Karen continued. "Little Gabriel was never for a minute a burden. He was our child, and he made me keenly aware of how much love we can give."
Karen Garver and Rick Santorum met at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law. Karen, the daughter of Dr. Kenneth Garver, a geneticist, already had worked for several years in a neonatal intensive-care unit. She became interested in the law because, "A lot of the decisions we made in the neonatal unit were guided by the law."
Although Rick Santorum is the U.S. senator whose name is most associated with the issue of partial-birth abortion, Karen is the member of the family who embraced the issue first. "As a young man, Rick had just never really thought about the issue," Karen recalled. "When he ran for office, he was forced to think about it, and he did a lot of soul searching."
In addition to his wife's promptings, the future senator was influenced by his father-in-law. "Dad sat him down and said, 'Where are you on abortion?'" Karen recalled. "Rick sort of beat around the bush. But ultimately he realized that to be Catholic is to be pro-life."
But in 1994, when Santorum, a Republican, was elected to Congress, he had no idea that within two years he would be leading the fight against late-term abortions.
"When the issue came up," Karen said, "Rick felt very moved. He couldn't sit by quietly. He was advised not to get involved because he'd be known as 'the partial-birth abortion senator.' But Rick said, I'm here to do what's right. I'm not going to sit this out.' Of course, we didn't know how it was going to affect us personally." For the Santorums, the personal and political merged on Oct. 4, 1996, when the sonogram showed that Gabriel had "posterior urethral valve." Because of a valve that would not open, the child could not empty fluid from his bladder into the amniotic sac.
There was no fluid around his body. The physician who broke the news — coldly — informed the Santorums that he'd never known a child with the defect to survive.
They were devastated. "We are not going to let you go," Karen wrote in her letter to Gabriel. "We decided that what this insensitive physician just told us was simply not true. You are not going to die."
For a brief time, it looked as if the Santorums really might be able to save their child. Dr. N. Scott Adzick of the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, whom Rick had recently met, was doing pioneering work with pediatric and intrauterine surgery.
Speaking gently in down-to-earth terms, Adzick explained that, although the situation was very serious, there was some chance that that the child could be saved through a shunt procedure. The Santorums readily agreed, and on the way home from the hospital they chose a name — Gabriel Michael, after the two archangels. "So, my beautiful son, you now have a name," Karen wrote in a letter to Gabriel.
Although the procedure was risky, Gabriel survived. For a while, it looked as if the Santorums had indeed managed to save the life of their son. Unfortunately, however, this was not the case. As a result of the surgery, Karen developed abdominal cramps and a high fever, results of a serious infection that had spread to the amniotic sac. The infection triggered labor contractions, and Karen's own life was threatened by the possibility of septic shock. Inevitably, Gabriel would have to be delivered —at 20 weeks' pregnancy and with no chance of survival.
Once again, the Santorums found themselves confronted with a sonogram, which showed an amniotic sac full of fluid: "Your Daddy stared at the monitor, and I stared at his face," Karen wrote. "Then I saw his tears. It worked, honey. The surgery worked.' The shunt was working perfectly. How cruel an irony. Either way, Gabriel, we lose."
Gabriel Michael Santorum was born at 12:45 a.m. on Oct. 11. "It was a silent birth, his mother wrote. "How I would have loved to have heard a cry."
Rick Santorum baptized his son immediately. Gabriel lived two hours. But his was a life filled with love. It is also one of the most amazing passages in the book.
"Daddy and I bundled you in a blanket," Karen wrote, "and put a hat on your head to keep you warm. We held you ever so close, sang to you, spoke softly in your perfect little ears, and held your perfect little hands and feet. We could not stop kissing and hugging you."
For the Santorums, the moments with Gabriel were so precious that they were determined to hold onto them. "We took many pictures and made little hand and footprints on paper," Karen wrote in her letter to Gabriel. "As sad as it was, the time with you gave us a chance to love and care for you. There you were, our beautiful son, your life so brief, and yet your impact so great."
"One of the things I learned from Little Gabriel," Karen said, "is that love can't be conditional — I'll love you if you are a healthy baby."
Karen continued to write her letters to her son for more than a year. Her last letter described planting flowers on his grave.
"Throughout the partial-birth abortion debate," she wrote in one of her letter after Gabriel's death, "through all the distortions, all the untruths, all the back and forth between both sides, one very compelling image remained, I think, in the minds of many Americans. That image was of a very sick infant destined to die shortly after birth and the anguished parents who thought they had no choice but to end their child's life. Gabriel, I wish we could take that image and replace it with the image we knew."
Hayes writes from Washington, D.C.
This item 657 digitally provided courtesy of CatholicCulture.org
