Santorum: Prenatal Testing Causes More Abortions

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Calling President Obama’s theology “phony” wasn’t the only controversial comment Rick Santorum made Saturday. Santorum stoked fears about the health care reform and abortion as well.

The surging candidate claimed at an event in Ohio that the  provision of cost-free prenatal testing under the Affordable Care Act will lead to more abortions:

One of the things that you don’t know about Obamacare and one of the mandates is they require free prenatal testing in every insurance policy in America. Why?  Because it saves money in health care. Why? Because free prenatal testing ends up in more abortions and therefore less care that has to be done because we cull the ranks of the disabled in our society.

He defended those claims on CBS’s Face the Nation Sunday:

“We’re talking about specifically prenatal testing and specifically amniocentesis,” Santorum explained, who described the procedure as “done for the purposes of identifying maladies of a child in the womb. In– in which in many cases and in fact most cases a physicians recommend, particularly if there’s a problem, recommend abortion. We know, Bob, that ninety percent of Down syndrome children in America are aborted. So to suggest where does that come from? I have a child who has trisomy 18. Almost a hundred percent of trisomy 18 children are encouraged to be aborted.”

Prenatal testing ends up in more abortions, Santorum said, “because we cull the ranks of the disabled in our society.”

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