Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum is taking issue with comments pro-life presidential hopeful Ben Carson made about the legislation Congress passed to help Terri Schiavo’s family try to save her life.
As LifeNews reported, Carson thinks the federal and state governments overreached when they attempted to protect Terri Schiavo from a painful 14-day starvation and dehydration death. Despite the best efforts of pro-life lawmakers in Congress and the Florida state legislature, where lawmakers approved pro-life laws to allow Terri’s family to take their case to federal courts and to allow then-Governor Jeb Bush to try to protect her, Terri’s estranged husband won a court order to euthanize her against her will.
In comments over the weekend, Carson said: “We face those kinds of issues all the time and while I don’t believe in euthanasia, you have to recognize that people that are in that condition do have a series of medical problems that occur that will take them out. Your job [as a doctor] is to keep them comfortable throughout that process and not to treat everything that comes up.”
About the bills Congress and the Florida legislature passed to allow Terri’s family to take their lawsuit to protect her to federal court and to give Bush more authority to protect Terri, Carson added: “I don’t think it needed to get to that level. I think it was much ado about nothing.”
Now, in exclusive comments to LifeNews.com, Santorum, who was a Pennsylvania senator at the time and a primary co-sponsor of the Senate bill Congress passed and pro-life President George W. Bush signed, says he disagrees with Carson’s take on the bill.
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“All life deserves to be treated with dignity and respect. That was the message that persuaded every member of the senate to agree to a federal court review before Terri was starved to death,” Santorum said.
Santorum told LifeNews that there was such agreement in the Senate on the bill at the time that it was passed unanimously and even had the support of Democratic leader Harry Reid.
Santorum added: “Harry Reid and I thought the taking of her life was worth doing something, not nothing. The Senate understood that for the Schindler family and millions of pro-life advocates this was not ‘much ado about nothing’.”
Santorum also took to Twitter to make the same message:
As the co author of the law that required a fed court review, it was not “much ado about nothing”. https://t.co/zjMlhtjiPA
— Rick Santorum (@RickSantorum) November 17, 2015
LifeNews still has a pending request for comment that has been emailed to the Carson campaign and a search of news compilation web sites indicates Carson has not issued any update or clarification to his comments on Terri Schiavo at this time. We will report on any additional statements he makes.
