Pro-Life Senator Rick Santorum Launches Republican Campaign for President

National   |   Steven Ertelt   |   May 27, 2015   |   6:14PM   |   Washington, DC

Former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, a pro-life stalwart, made his bid for the Republican nomination for president official today. The Catholic former elected official says he will make working families the hallmark of his presidential campaign.

“I believe that the right to life must be protected for ALL Americans – especially those who have not yet been born,” Santorum said.

Last month, Santorum spoke at an event for the Women’s Help Center in Jacksonville, Florida and reiterated his pro-life beliefs.

He said, “America will never be whole, America will never be good if America continues to kill its children.” According to Sunshine State News, he also said that the work of the Women’s Help Center was “remarkable” and “important.” The pregnancy center was founded by Catholics in 1990 and helps women make life affirming choices when facing unplanned pregnancies.

Santorum explained the importance of their ministry and said, “We have seen it in our lives, the transformative love of Jesus Christ. This is a ministry, showing the love of Jesus, showing the love of each and every one of you, showing the love for those who are most damaged by our culture.” He added that America is “a country that is struggling with the truth, struggling with what is right and wrong.”

Santorum ran for the Republican presidential nod in 2012 but came up short to Mitt Romney.

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His decision to suspend his campaign came on the heels of the hospitalization of Bella, his daughter, who was released from the hospital after facing an illness. It was the second time since the beginning of the year that she has required hospitalization. Bella suffers from a chromosomal condition called Trisomy 18.

Santorum is a passionate pro-life conservative and two decades ago, he was elected to the House of Representatives as one of the new GOP freshmen ready to take on the status quo in Washington. A decade later, Santorum beat Democratic Sen. Harris Wofford and he moved up the ranks of the Republican Senate leadership as a young activist who was set to take on the slow-moving chamber and instill a reform ethic.

He was pegged as a rising star — especially after leading the battle to pass the ban on partial-birth abortions — until he lost a difficult re-election bid in a bad year for Republican candidates nationwide. Santorum held his Senate seat for 12 years before losing in 2006 to Democrat Bob Casey, the son of a popular former governor and someone who ran as a pro-life Democrat.

But that hasn’t stopped Santorum from pressing on with his pro-life perspective.

“To me there are truths out there,” Santorum said once in an AP interview. “There are things that are right and things that are wrong. That may not be popular and it may lose you an election, but that’s OK.”

“If you look back at what I did and when I did it, people can say: You know what? He may have lost but he didn’t flinch. He stood by what he believed in and he continued the fight through the end,” he said.

When former Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels said Republicans ought to declare a truce on abortion, Santorum strongly opposed the idea.

“I don’t think he understands that Reagan’s three-legged stool is not just that we have three legs of the stool, the social conservative, the fiscal conservative and national security conservatives, but that the material made of all three parts of the stool is the same,” Santorum added. “And it’s a moral and cultural heritage of this country, is what that stool, the material itself that the stool is made of.”

Santorum continued: “And if we deny that, if we don’t understand that those issues are intertwined, and that without a strong and good and moral culture, we can’t have limited government, you can’t have lower taxes, you can’t, you don’t have the freedoms that we enjoy unless we have a moral code by which can all agree to live by. And for him to say that those issues need to be put in the background, I just, I’m stunned by it.”

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