OK, so there was a story that made the rounds about Rick Santorum, right, about how his wife went into early labor with one of her pregnancies, like at 22 weeks, so anyway they ended up with a stillborn fetus (legally a fetus, not a baby, like it would be officially registered as a late miscarriage, not a stillbirth) and he had pictures of the dead fetus in his office and with his older kids holding it and it was a creepy story, but once I became a parent I found it much LESS creepy because like. if I lost a pregnancy at that stage, who the fuck knows, right? But then you know what he & his wife did? They buried the fetus. To them it was a baby, their baby, and they gave it a funeral, and that makes TOTAL sense to me. TOTAL sense. Even before I was a parent.
Keeping your fetus in a jar makes LESS sense to me now that I have a kid. I don't know. I've been walking around since I heard this story thinking "did Barbara Bush just make Rick Santorum look completely normal to me?"
I don't know. Losing a kid fucks you up, big time. But fetus in a jar is a new one on me.
Yeah, I totally get that losing a kid can make you go over the edge. And I can understand the Santorums' actions -- the funeral, I mean -- although the pictures are a little creepy. None of the articles I've read say whether the Bush fetus was given a decent burial, or was just, you know, kept. But there's a cold-bloodedness about the account that unnerves me. Like here:
OK, so there was a story that made the rounds about Rick Santorum, right, about how his wife went into early labor with one of her pregnancies, like at 22 weeks, so anyway they ended up with a stillborn fetus (legally a fetus, not a baby, like it would be officially registered as a late miscarriage, not a stillbirth) and he had pictures of the dead fetus in his office and with his older kids holding it and it was a creepy story, but once I became a parent I found it much LESS creepy because like. if I lost a pregnancy at that stage, who the fuck knows, right? But then you know what he & his wife did? They buried the fetus. To them it was a baby, their baby, and they gave it a funeral, and that makes TOTAL sense to me. TOTAL sense. Even before I was a parent.
Keeping your fetus in a jar makes LESS sense to me now that I have a kid. I don't know. I've been walking around since I heard this story thinking "did Barbara Bush just make Rick Santorum look completely normal to me?"
I don't know. Losing a kid fucks you up, big time. But fetus in a jar is a new one on me.
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In a remarkably candid interview to be broadcast tonight, the former President said Barbara Bush asked doctors to save the dead baby so she could show it to her son.
On a subsequent hospital visit she calmly motioned to the jar and told him: ‘Here’s the foetus’.
There's a wrongness about that that's hard to put into words.
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