The plight of Rick Santorum’s daughter Bella is central to his campaign. In January, a supporter in Iowa wore her picture on a pin
By TRIP GABRIEL and KATHARINE Q. SEELYE
Mitt Romney’s attempt to pull off a victory in Rick Santorum’s home state of Pennsylvania was all set to go into overdrive Monday with attack ads highlighting how voters there soundly rejected him in his 2006 Senate race.
But the aggressive tactics that have served Mr. Romney so well in other states faced an unexpected complication: the emergency hospitalization of Mr. Santorum’s disabled daughter Bella, which prompted an outpouring of public sympathy. The Romney camp abruptly pulled the ads on Monday morning. Bella, 3, who was born with a rare chromosomal disorder, was expected to return home soon to Virginia from the hospital, the Santorum campaign said. Her medical struggles, which in some ways have become the emotional centerpiece of Mr. Santorum’s race, have the potential to complicate Mr. Romney’s effort to quickly end the Republican nominating fight.
Campaign says Santorum's daughter out of hospital
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Mr. Santorum’s decision to cancel campaign events to be with his daughter after she was hospitalized on Friday with pneumonia — her second bout since January — intensified speculation that he would choose the moment to exit the race gracefully, as a chorus of Republican leaders have urged for the sake of party unity.
But Mr. Gidley doused that notion. Mr. Santorum planned to return to campaigning in the south-central Pennsylvania town of Bedford with a rally on Tuesday.
“The fact is, there is still a narrow path, but a path nonetheless, for Rick Santorum to become the nominee, and the Romney campaign knows it or they wouldn’t be sending people all over Pennsylvania and Texas to prevent it,” Mr. Gidley said.
The ad the Romney campaign pulled, after it ran at least 11 times in the Philadelphia media market, according to Kantar Media’s campaign media analysis group, bluntly addressed Pennsylvania voters: “We fired him as senator. Why promote him to president?”
The Romney campaign substituted a positive ad “out of deference” to Mr. Santorum, a spokeswoman, Andrea Saul, said.
Once Bella is released from the hospital, the Romney campaign is expected to put the anti-Santorum ad back into its rotation, although that could take a day or two. The Romney campaign has planned a $2.9 million barrage of advertising over the next two weeks in Pennsylvania, which Mr. Santorum has called a must-win contest, although polls show him losing ground.
Jim Roddey, chairman of the Republican Committee of Allegheny County, who has endorsed Mr. Romney, said the campaign probably would conduct polling to see whether Bella’s hospitalization remained a sensitive issue. But, he said, sympathy for Bella would probably not bring Mr. Santorum any new votes, nor would it deter the Romney camp from full-throated attacks on Mr. Santorum.
“He’s still not talking about the kinds of things most people are most concerned about, jobs and the economy.”
Bella, who was born with trisomy 18, a rare disorder that is fatal to most of children within their first year, has become a touchstone for Mr. Santorum, both humanizing him and serving as flashpoint for debate over health care with President Obama.
Mr. Santorum mentions her at almost every appearance, sometimes explaining that his wife is not at his side because she is home caring for her, and sometimes, especially in churches, telling of how when Bella was born, doctors sent her home to die because her disorder was “incompatible with life.”
“It angered us to hear that,” Mr. Santorum explains in a video on his campaign Web site. “She was our daughter like every one of our children and we were not going to let her go.”
While many voters find Mr. Santorum’s brand of social conservatism and his speaking style off-putting, it is clear at rallies that Bella softens him. Audiences listen raptly to his descriptions, sometimes wiping away tears.
Trisomy 18 results in stillbirth for about half the babies carried to term, and 90 percent of children die before their first birthday, said Dr. Robert Marion, chief of genetics and developmental medicine at the Children’s Hospital at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx.
After the first birthday the survival odds increase, he said, although pneumonia is a common cause of hospitalization because trisomy 18 children often have congenital heart diseases that cause fluid to build up in the lungs, causing infections. The condition has become rarer in the past 25 years, Dr. Marion said, “because people are diagnosing it prenatally and terminating the pregnancies more often now.”
That is one of the reasons Mr. Santorum cites Bella in his campaign — an embodiment of his respect for the sanctity of life and a reason he opposes Mr. Obama’s health care overhaul. He opposes its requirement that insurance plans cover prenatal screenings, principally amniocentesis, which he said are used to “cull” fetuses with birth defects.
The procedures “are done by and large to find out late in pregnancy whether the child in the womb has a disability,” Mr. Santorum said in Ohio in February.
“And as we all know, 90 percent of Down syndrome children in this country are aborted once the mother and father find out that child is going to be less than what they were expecting.”
He also maintained that the 2010 health care law, because it was designed in part to slow runaway costs, would lead to “a brave new world” in which doctors are pressured to ration care, and disabled children like his daughter would be denied care.
Dr. Marion, whose program sees about 7,500 children a year with developmental disabilities, said most health insurance does not cover many services the children need and that currently “the government has washed their hands” and there is no public financing for them either.
“It’s not a matter of these kids being squeezed because there’s pressure on the person providing the care,” he said. “What happens is we’re going to have to turn away some kids with trisomy 18 because there’s nobody to pay for it.”
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