Read Online Bella's Gift by Rick Santorum - Free Book Online

found the Lord! Many people think He has long abandoned that place, but in fact, I found many people of faith not only in the Senate but also in ministries devoted to helping people working in the Capitol.
    It just so happened that this spiritual transformation was occurring at the time the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act was being debated in Congress. This bill sought to ban an abortionprocedure performed on babies that were at least twenty weeks old. I was appalled to learn it was legal for a twenty-week-old fetus to be deliberately delivered alive in a breech position, then killed by the doctor as he or she held the baby and thrust pointed scissors into the base of the baby’s skull. I was shocked even more by watching senators defend this horrific procedure. I could no longer stay silent. I decided to rise and speak against the gruesome practice.
    When I went to the Senate floor to speak, you would have thought I had never spoken in public in my life. I was done before I realized what I had said, which turned out to be little more than gibberish. Thankfully, my staff kindly cleaned up my remarks in the Congressional Record so they could make some sense. Nine months later, due to a variety of circumstances, including my finding faith, I was on the Senate floor again talking about the issue, only this time I was leading the debate. I was now managing the override of President Clinton’s veto.
    The debate was as intense as a debate over life and death should be. Even though I was trained as a lawyer, I had done very little criminal work other than an internship at a public defender’s office during law school. During that debate, I felt I had to bring the passion of a defense attorney who was trying to save an innocent client from being executed. But it wasn’t just one, but hundreds of victims, who would die a brutal death if I failed.
    Even though I was in my first session as a senator, it was not my first time around the block. I had managed the welfare reform bill earlier that summer to successful passage, so I was ready for action. But this was a battle beyond the object of the legislation. This was the ultimate moral and spiritualbattle playing out on an unlikely stage. As a thirty-eight-year-old first-term senator talking publicly about this grave issue for the first time, I should have felt chastened or even overwhelmed. I didn’t. Thanks to prayers of support, I had never felt more in the zone.
    President Clinton had vetoed a few bills from the Republican Congress, including welfare, but this was the first congressional attempt to override a veto. That was front-page news in every paper in America. As expected, the House had easily overridden his veto, so all the coverage was on the debate in the Senate, where the result was uncertain. This debate was not just about the bill at hand, but the coverage was going to shape public opinion in advance of an election and provide the arguments for candidates running against opponents of the ban in key Senate races around the country. The debate on the Senate floor really mattered.
    In the closing hours of the debate, I was struck by the defense mounted by the pro-abortion senators. Senator Dianne Feinstein from California succinctly advanced their argument: “Some women carry fetuses with severe birth defects late into pregnancy without knowing it. For example, fetal deformities that are not easy to spot early on in the pregnancy include: cases where the brain forms outside the skull, or the stomach and intestines form outside the body, or do not form at all; or fetuses with no ears, mouths, legs, or kidneys.”
    She and other senators were using examples of children with disabilities (some with problems that are treatable) to justify their opposition, suggesting that the government should not stand in the way of parents who want to kill their children once they find out their babies aren’t perfect. While thisstance came as a shock to me, particularly from some