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The government shouldn't make health care providers fully cover prenatal tests like amniocentesis, which can determine the possibility of Down syndrome or other fetal problems, Republican presidential hopeful Rick Santorum said Sunday.

Santorum, an outspoken opponent of abortion rights, told the CBS News program "Face the Nation" on Sunday that amniocentesis "more often than not" results in abortion.

"People have the right to do it, but to have the government force people to provide it free, to me, is a bit loaded," he said. He said Saturday at an appearance in Ohio that the law was intended to increase abortions and reduce overall health care costs.

"One of the mandates is they require free prenatal testing in every insurance policy in America," Santorum, a conservative Roman Catholic, told a Christian Alliance luncheon in Columbus. "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 added that the requirement was "another hidden message as to what President Obama thinks of those who are less able." (what an INCREDIBLE reach!)

The White House referred CNN to Obama's re-election campaign for comment, and campaign spokeswoman Lis Smith called Santorum's remarks "the latest in a long string of unfortunate comments in the race to the bottom that the Republican presidential primary has become."

"Prenatal screenings are essential to promote the health of both the mother and baby and to ensure safe deliveries," Smith said. "These misinformed and dangerous comments reinforce why women cannot trust any of the Republican candidates for president."

On Sunday, Santorum mentioned his own experience with this 3-year-old daughter Isabella, who has Trisomy 18, a chromosome disorder that often results in stillbirths or early childhood death. He said prenatal testing showed the problem, and doctors recommend abortion in virtually all cases.

Such a recommendation is common when any problem is detected through amniocentesis, said Santorum, who added that in such cases "we know that 90% of Down syndrome children are aborted."

Some studies since the late 1990s do suggest a high percentage of women terminate their pregnancies after receiving a Down syndrome diagnosis, with one British study putting the figure as high as 92 percent. A 2005 study of nearly 1,100 pregnant women found 76% would consider an abortion if tests indicated their child would be born with Down syndrome.

Now considered the main conservative challenger to the more moderate Mitt Romney, Santorum has shed a more understated demeanor to challenge both Romney and Obama as the Republican campaign heads toward a series of key primaries in coming weeks, including Super Tuesday on March 6.

He continued throwing out the cultural red meat for primary voters Sunday night, telling a rally at a Georgia church that Obama was intent on starting a cultural war. As the audience roared with applause, he called on the country to build a foundation that will "defend the church, defend the family, defend the nonprofit community, defend them from a government that wants to weaken them."

His attack on insurance coverage for prenatal testing was the latest in a series of controversial comments he has made since surging to the top tier of polls in the Republican presidential race. He also found himself defending other Saturday comments regarding Obama's religion, appearing to question the president's adherence to Bible-based Christian theology.

Santorum said Saturday the president was not motivated by concerns for ordinary Americans but by "some phony ideal, some phony theology.

"Oh, not a theology based on the Bible, a different theology. But no less a theology," he said.

Asked about those remarks on CBS, Santorum said he was referring to Obama's energy policies, which he said favored what he called radical environmentalism. Asked specifically if he was questioning Obama's Christian beliefs, Santorum said: "I wasn't suggesting the president is not a Christian. I accept the fact the president is a Christian."

Santorum's comments may appeal to some Republican voters who have questioned Obama's faith before, or others who saw the administration's recent contraception mandate as an overreach. Last month, Santorum was criticized by some for not correcting a voter who called the president a Muslim when she stood up to ask a question at one of his campaign town halls.

"These are the questions that I think Republicans can unite on," (Republican Gov. Mitch)Daniels said. "They do have to be framed, as they really are, as the defense of individual freedom against the right now limitless power of the state." http://www.cnn.com/2012/02/19/politics/santorum-prenatal-testing/index
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"It doesn't fit his pattern of trying to drive down consumption, trying to drive up your cost of transportation to accomplish his political science goal of reducing carbon dioxide," he said.
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Santorum told reporters that the message he was trying to convey was that the president merely holds “different moral values.”

“You may want to call it a theology, you may want to call it secular values,” he said. “Whatever you want to call it. . . it is a different set of moral values that they are imposing on people who have a constitutional right to have their own values within the church.”

He said Obama has reached a “low in this country’s history of oppressing religious freedom that we have never seen before.” (which is absolutely astonishing "red-meat" language!)
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“You can call it a theology, you can call it a moral code, you can call it a world view,” he said. “They want to impose [that] on everybody else while they insist and complain that somehow or another people of Judeo Christian faith are intolerant of their new moral code.”

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Santorum's comments may strike certain chords with some Republican voters who have questioned Obama's faith before

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This from the person who threw a hissy over how the media treated her messiah, just a couple of days ago ?

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He says he's against government mandates forcing healthcare on our citizens, but oddly he's shown himself to be quite in favor of those same mandates when it comes to children and women.

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