Santorum and the baby

I've been reading, with a mixture of amusement and chagrin, the various defenses of Rick Santorum's actions regarding the death of his son Gabriel. My own first instinct, upon learning of what Santorum had done, was to feel revolted. Defenders have been pointing out, however, that the American Pregnancy Association recommends that "it is important for your family members to spend time with the baby [to] help them come to terms with their loss." In other words, what the Santorums did, in bundling up their dead child and taking it home for the child's siblings to see, carried no odor of the strange.

I beg to differ. If the point being made by the APA is that siblings might benefit from an encounter with death, then I'm on board.* But taking your dead loved one on a trip, outside of a proper funerary context, still strikes me as macabre. I just celebrated my mother's gi-il, and I find it hard even to imagine doing something like this with Mom's body. As I type this, the thought fills me with disgust and horror.

Call me old-school. The dead deserve to be treated with respect, which means, in part, shifting their mortal remains around as little as possible. (The Jews have it right on this score.) What would have been so wrong with having Gabriel's siblings brought to the hospital? That scenario is much more common. Extramural show-and-tell, by contrast, is not.

So I'm going to be the lone voice of dissent, here. I still believe that the Santorums' actions were creepy and just plain wrong. I'll grant that people may do strange things in moments of extremity; I certainly don't want to jeer at Gabriel's death, despite my long-standing visceral dislike of his father. But the doing of strange things is still a choice, and my feeling is that the Santorums could have handled this tragedy very differently.

So even though Mark Steyn refuses to answer the question,** I find it worth asking: would you bundle your recently-deceased loved one up-- a baby, a parent, a sibling, an uncle or aunt or grandparent-- and drive him or her across town for the benefit of survivors who weren't there when the loved one passed away? I know for a fact that I wouldn't.

UPDATE: For what it's worth, Santorum's actions-- taking the dead baby home-- are not recommended by current experts. I mention this out of a sense of fairness: if people are going to quote outdated chapter and verse from the American Pregnancy Association, then it's only proper to counterbalance that information with more current information:

But some mental health experts believe the Santorums may have been ahead of their time by ritualizing their son's death in order to exorcize their grief, though they say taking a body home is unusual and not recommended.

In the context of the times -- the year was 1996 when the family buried Gabriel -- their behavior was understandable, according to Dr. David Diamond, a psychologist and co-author of the 2005 book "Unsung Lullabies."

Helen Coons, a clinical psychologist and president of Women's Mental Health Associates in Philadelphia, said couples are not encouraged to bring a deceased fetus home.

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*Jessica Heslam very touchingly makes a similar point in her recent article about Santorum's and her own family's tragedy in "Our Bereavement is Our Own." She's more forgiving of Santorum's strangeness than I am, but I can't help noticing that she seems not to have done what the Santorums did.

**Steyn's piece takes advantage of Gabriel's death to make what is essentially a political point. From the article's title onward, Steyn's rant is less about a dead child than it is about perceived leftist hypocrisy. Sorry, Gabriel-- you're still somebody's football, mainly because we live in an age of manufactured, choreographed outrage.


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