Rick Santorum presidential campaign, 2016/Abortion

	; ; Former presidential candidate ; Rick Santorum
	Political offices: ; Former U.S. Senator; (1995-2007); Former U.S. Representative; (1991-1995);
	Santorum on the issues:
	Taxes • Banking policy • Government regulations • International trade • Budgets • Agricultural subsidies • Federal assistance programs • Foreign affairs • Federalism • Natural resources • Healthcare • Immigration • Education • Abortion • Gay rights
	Republican candidate:
	Donald Trump
	Ballotpedia's presidential election coverage; 2028 • 2024 • 2020 • 2016

Rick Santorum announced his presidential run on May 27, 2015.^[1]

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This page was current as of the 2016 election.

On August 25, 2015, Rick Santorum called for Planned Parenthood to be prosecuted. He said, "How low can we go? How much can we walk down this road to depravity that we just see a little child, a child with a beating heart, and your reaction is to dissect it. Your reaction is to remove a brain while the heart is beating. How cruel is this? How much have we dehumanized that child in the womb? How callus are we to human life and what's the effect on the American psyche? What's the effect on who we are as people if we just have such coldness to how we treat innocent human life? Planned Parenthood should not just be defunded, it should be prosecuted. If that child was alive, there are laws in place to prosecute these people who are doing these horrific things."^[2]

Appearing on CNN on August 14, 2015, Santorum said he did not support the use of fetal tissue in medical research. "I wouldn’t, because one of the things that you saw in the Planned Parenthood tapes, was that a lot of women are told, ‘Hey, look, this — if you have an abortion, good things are going come from it, we’re going to be able to use this tissue for a lot of reasons.’ And so it is used in some cases to, I won’t say coerce, but certainly make women feel more comfortable about having [an] abortion. And I think that’s something that I would not want to participate in," Santorum explained.^[3]^[4]

Santorum sponsored S 3 - Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003, which made it a crime to perform a partial birth abortion. It also defined a "'partial-birth abortion' as an abortion in which the person performing the abortion: (1) deliberately and intentionally vaginally delivers a living fetus until, in the case of a head-first presentation, the entire fetal head is outside the mother's body, or, in the case of a breech presentation, any part of the fetal trunk past the navel is outside the mother's body; and (2) performs the overt act, other than completion of delivery, that kills the partially delivered living fetus." It became law on November 5, 2003.^[5]

In April 2011, Santorum argued for defunding Planned Parenthood. He said, "That's an organization that has a very sordid history and founding and one that I still think focuses in on activities that a lot of people have moral objections to. Public funds should not be used for that purpose."^[6]

Santorum sponsored S 6 - Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 1997, which proposed criminalizing partial birth abortions. It also proposed defining "'partial-birth abortion' as an abortion in which the person performing the procedure partially vaginally delivers a living fetus before killing the infant and completing the delivery."^[7]

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