Rick Santorum on feminism and abortion.

From his book "It Takes a Family: Conservatism and the Common Good":

It is obvious that for [women who feel regret], abortion was not a liberating choice. These women and many others say abortion was a last resort, or that they felt they had no other choice. It is a decision, often born out of loneliness and desperation, that can cause a lifetime of suffering.

Alice Paul, the feminist author of the Equal Rights Amendment, was right when she said, “Abortion is the ultimate exploitation of women.”

Dorinda Bordlee of Americans United for Life wrote recently, “Roe has ruined romance. Every woman's deepest desire to love and be loved has been distorted into a license to use and be used. Women have paid with their bodies and their souls. Abandoned emotionally and financially by the men they loved, and moved by profound grief at the loss of their children, they stand in front of crowds with signs that say ‘I regret my abortion.'” Serrin Foster of Feminists for Life sums it up well: “Women deserve better than abortion.”

... [I]f you were to ask one of the village elders their view of liberty they would say, “the freedom to do whatever you desire, as long as nobody gets hurt.” How does that square with abortion? Doesn't their support for abortion undermine the basic tenet of liberal orthodoxy? Can you honestly say that in an abortion “no one gets hurt?” What about the 327 women who died and countless others who became sterile from legal abortions between 1973 and 1999, according to the Centers for Disease Control? What about the four women you just heard from: didn't they get hurt? What about the exploitation and misogyny? And, yes, what about the babies? Is this caveat to No-Fault Freedom just an obligatory yet disingenuous smokescreen? The village elders' response provides great insight into the liberal mind.

The village elders choose to ignore or deny the humanity of the child in the womb and the emotional trauma of the mother and choose to focus solely on freedom or “choice.” Think about it. When you hear an abortion supporter argue his or her position, nowhere do you hear that a baby's heart can be seen beating at three weeks; that new 4D sonograms show that from twelve weeks, unborn babies can stretch, kick, and leap around the womb—well before the mother can feel movement; from eighteen weeks, they can open their eyes, although most doctors thought eyelids were fused until 26 weeks; from 26 weeks, when partial birth abortions are still performed, they appear to exhibit a whole range of typical baby behavior and moods, including scratching, smiling, crying, hiccupping, and sucking.

Almost never do you hear about what is being chosen, other than the sterile words “terminating a pregnancy.” Nowhere do you hear that over 93 percent of abortions are performed on healthy mothers with healthy babies who were not the victim of rape or incest, which means that in the vast majority of cases abortion is actually postconception birth control. Nowhere do you hear that 48 percent of women obtaining abortions in any given year already had at least one abortion. Nowhere will you see the words infant, baby, or child.

The advocates of abortion, like Planned Parenthood and the National Abortion Rights Action League, teach that if you have to say anything about what is in the womb you should use dehumanizing terms like “product of conception,” “embryo,” and “fetal tissue.” Or, if you must, fetus. Thanks to a lot of help from their allies in the news and entertainment media, they have turned the child in the womb into a nobody, and therefore “nobody gets hurt.”...

This chapter goes on to quote from the 1999 Senate debate over partial-birth abortion law. Santorum, as Senator, argued with Senators Boxer and Feingold in an effort to make them appear unprincipled if they tried to draw any line defining who is a human being deserving the protection of the law. Santorum's position is: "If you don't draw a bright clear line to give constitutional protection—i.e., personhood—to all human life at the moment when human life begins—at conception—then everything becomes just a power game."