Gilda De Ferrari – 7/7/05

This page was last updated on July 7, 2005.

If Santorum is so pro-life …; Gilda De Ferrari; Beaver County Times; July 7, 2005.

Ms. De Ferrari has combined two issues into one in order to misrepresent Mr. Santorum’s positions and votes.

Below is a detailed critique of the subject letter.

“U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum voted to permit the Environmental Protection Agency to spend funds on experiments using pesticides on children, infants, fetuses and pregnant women.”

[RWC] No he didn’t. You’ll read below what I mean.

“Fortunately, funding was denied to the environmental department to do this by a vote of 60-37.

“Santorum was one of the 37 siding with the pesticide industry. The experiments were to have been done on a low-income population.”

[RWC] Without an order from Congress, the EPA shelved in April the study to which Ms. De Ferrari referred.

The vote to which Ms. De Ferrari referred would ban any human testing to determine pesticide toxicity. A knee-jerk reaction is that banning controlled human testing would be a good thing. Without testing, however, how would we know if a pesticide would prove harmful to humans prior to widespread usage?

An alternative amendment passed 57-40 that would allow human testing to continue but would require the EPA to determine if a test would be ethical and if the benefits would outweigh the risks to participants. It’s my understanding Mr. Santorum voted for this amendment.

“Now, we all know that Santorum is very pro-life, so are we to conclude by his vote on this issue that he is selective about which lives he would protect? That some babies’ and women’s and children’s lives are more valuable than others? Does he think that poisoning babies with insecticide is permissible but abortion is not?

“He should explain himself.”

[RWC] Ms. De Ferrari needs to explain why she didn’t get the facts correct.