Standing steadfast as the most socially right-wing candidate in the GOP presidential field, Rick Santorum has repeatedly touted his extreme anti-choice position, which dictates that abortion should be uniformly illegal, even in cases of rape or incest. He even suggested that physicians who provide abortions to such victims should be criminally charged.

Last Friday, CNN’s Piers Morgan asked Santorum to clarify his reasoning behind such a callous position. Insisting that “it’s not a matter of religious values,” Santorum explained that sexual assault victims should “accept this horribly created” pregnancy because it is “nevertheless a gift in a very broken way” and that, when it comes down to it, a victim just has “to make the best out of a bad situation“:

SANTORUM: Well, you can make the argument that if she doesn’t have this baby, if she kills her child, that that, too, could ruin her life. And this is not an easy choice. I understand that. As horrible as the way that that son or daughter and son was created, it still is her child. And whether she has that child or doesn’t, it will always be her child. And she will always know that. And so to embrace her and to love her and to support her and get her through this very difficult time, I’ve always, you know, I believe and I think the right approach is to accept this horribly created — in the sense of rape — but nevertheless a gift in a very broken way, the gift of human life, and accept what God has given to you. As you know, we have to, in lots of different aspects of our life. We have horrible things happen. I can’t think of anything more horrible. But, nevertheless, we have to make the best out of a bad situation.

Watch it:

The problem with Santorum’s sense of humanity is that it doesn’t seem to extend to the victim. The emotional and physical trauma endured during and after a sexual assault often leaves a woman feeling robbed of any control over her own body and welfare. Robbing a woman of the choice to decide what to do with such “horribly created” consequences only contributes to the victim’s trauma.

What’s more, Santorum’s argument forces a woman in these circumstances to share his religious beliefs and “accept what God has given to [her.]” A woman may very well share his belief and decide to carry the pregnancy to the term, but the fundamental point is that that should be her choice — not the government’s, and certainly not Santorum’s.

Yesterday marked the 39th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Roe v. Wade, which affirmed women’s constitutional right to an abortion and enshrined the fundamental principle of privacy into precedent.

President Obama marked the date by saying he remains committed “to protecting a woman’s right to choose and this fundamental constitutional right”:

“We must remember that this Supreme Court decision not only protects a woman’s health and reproductive freedom, but also affirms a broader principle: that government should not intrude on private family matters,” Obama said in a statement Sunday. [...]

“While this is a sensitive and often divisive issue — no matter what our views, we must stay united in our determination to prevent unintended pregnancies, support pregnant woman and mothers, reduce the need for abortion, encourage healthy relationships, and promote adoption,” Obama said.

“And as we remember this historic anniversary, we must also continue our efforts to ensure that our daughters have the same rights, freedoms, and opportunities as our sons to fulfill their dreams.”

While the Supreme Court’s decision struck down many laws banning abortion as unconstitutional, conservative lawmakers in states across the country have been pushing the line more than ever before — and often blatantly crossing over it. Legislators pursued a record number of abortion restrictions in 2011, according to the Guttmacher Institute. Ninety-two measures enacted in 24 states dramatically limited women’s access to abortion services.

Politico Pulse pulls out this telling internal memo from Ryan Lizza’s New Yorker piece this morning examining the thinking of the Obama administration during the health care reform debate. Obama publicly flirted with the idea of making a greater investment in tort reform and pursued the proposals in order to secure Republican cooperation and support:

“On July 1, 2009, his top health care adviser, Nancy-Ann DeParle, submitted a detailed nine-page policy memo asking whether the White House should consider including medical-malpractice reform in the legislation. Most Democrats opposed the idea, but the American Medical Association was pushing for it. ‘Obviously, we shouldn’t do anything that weighs down the overall effort,’ Obama wrote back, in his characteristically cautious and reasonable style, ‘but if this helps the AMA stay on board, we should explore it.”

Ultimately, none of this mattered very much. The Affordable Care Act contains funding for tort reform demonstration projects — as well as a multitude of other Republican-backed initiatives — that the GOP ignored because they were more interested in preventing Obama from signing one of the most sweeping social reforms in a generation than addressing the nation’s health care crisis.

What the administration learned all to late is that the details of the policy had absolutely no bearing on the tone of the opposition. Republicans relied on the same “big government” talking points to combat reform even as the measure became more conservative and Democratic lawmakers stripped out initiatives like the public option, end-of-life counseling and a host of other provisions that Republicans found repugnant. But no matter how much the bill changed to resemble the Heritage-backed Romneycare solution that relied on private competition and private enterprise, the GOP still claimed that the government was taking over health care and rationing services to seniors.

Lizza reports that Obama still believed that he could win over the opposition and rejected good policy in order to make the bill more acceptable to conservative opinion makers. One memo reveals, for instance, that Obama turned down a pilot program “to study the most effective treatments for patients” within the Federal Employees Health Benefits Plan (FEHBP) because it was not “politically viable” and could prove a target for Fox News. The president wrote at the end of the memo, almost apologetically, “Unfortunately I think the political guys are right about how it would be characterized. Let’s go back at it in future years, when the temperature on health care and the economy has gone down.”

Almost two years later, the temperature is still at a boiling point and the GOP presidential candidates are crisscrossing the country accusing Obama and the law of everything from ending private enterprise to jeopardizing the livelihood of seniors. Given the partisan divide of modern American politics, Republicans and their supporters in the media will invent controversy where none exists and so it’s foolhardy to abandon good policy out of fear of inflaming the critics. They’ll burn you anyway, while you’ll have a harder time defending a decision that was made on political, rather than policy merits.

During an appearance on Fox News Sunday, House Speaker John Beohner (R-OH) confirmed that Republicans won’t be backing away from plans to privatize the Medicare program this year — despite voters’ rejection of the plan — and will attempt to “pursue a bipartisan Medicare proposal in order to deflect Democratic attacks”:

WALLACE: Will the House pass a budget this year, and will it have serious entitlement reform in it again such as last year’s proposal by Paul Ryan for premium supports (ph) as a way to change and reform Medicare?

BOEHNER: Well, that was one option on how we could save Medicare. There are other ideas. Paul Ryan and Ron Wyden, the Democrat senator from Oregon, came up with a bipartisan proposal. The idea here is that we’ve got to make changes to Medicare. Otherwise, it will not be there for seniors who count on it. So we will do a serious budget. But also, remember this: on Tuesday, it will be 1,000 days since the United States Senate passed a budget. One thousand days, and they have yet to pass a budget. How do you deal with the long-term fiscal problems that we have if you refuse to come to an agreement on a budget?

WALLACE: So I want to make it clear, because there had been some thought that maybe because of the hits that you guys took last year, you weren’t going to pass a budget. You are going to pass a budget again this year?

BOEHNER: Of course we are.

Watch it:

House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) echoed Boehner’s sentiment at the House Republican retreat in Baltimore on Friday, telling Reporters, “We’re not backing off on the kinds of reforms that we’ve advocated, but we have to write it.” “We’ve done more to normalize the idea of premium support than anything at all. We’re confident that these are the right policies. There’s an emerging bipartisan consensus that’s occurring on doing premium support reform to Medicare is the best way to save Medicare.”

Only one Democrat in the Senate, Ron Wyden (D-OR), has publicly embraced a watered down version of Ryan’s premium support proposal, but the plan — which would preserve traditional Medicare as an option for seniors and offer premium support credits that would do a better job of keeping up with health care costs — was rejected by Congressional Democrats and the White House. They argued that no version of premium support can achieve real savings without adverse consequences for beneficiaries, noting that the proposal could significantly shift costs to beneficiaries and fail to fully prevent private health insurance plans from attracting healthier beneficiaries and driving up premiums for those who remain in traditional Medicare.

In fact, there is very little evidence to suggest that private plans have or can do a better job of lowering spending. Medicare’s sheer size and bargaining clout have contributed to its greater success in controlling health care costs and the program has introduced market innovations and payment reforms that were later adopted by private industry. The Affordable Care Act will build on this structure by investing in new demonstration projects and payment reforms that will reward providers for delivering care more efficiently and — ultimately — lower the rate of growth in health care spending.