Reviewed by Marianne Rea-Luthin
Executive Director, Women Affirming Life
Gabriel Michael Santorum lived only two hours after his premature birth on October 11, 1996. But as his mother Karen so tenderly recalls in her Letters to Gabriel, "There you were, our beautiful son, your life so brief, and yet, your impact so great."
Letters to Gabriel is a tenderly written chronicle from the anguished heart of a mother totally in love with her unborn child, and burdened beyond description at her powerlessness to save him. It was a book Karen Santorum never intended to publish.
This extraordinary testament of the unconditional love of a mother and her child began in joy when Karen started writing letters to her unborn child upon learning she was pregnant. When a life-threatening physical abnormality was detected at 19 weeks, the letters took on a different meaning with Karen desperately hoping and praying that one day Gabriel would be able to read in them the story of his miraculous cure. In a cruel irony, the miracle she prayed so hard for did occur when a lifesaving operation was successfully done while Gabriel was still in utero. Forty-eight hours later infection set in and a perfectly formed, but too premature Gabriel Michael Santorum was born and died.
Karen Santorum continued writing letters to Gabriel after his death as a way of dealing with her enormous sense of loss and also to honor the memory of this tiny son who brought so much joy and meaning to her, her husband, and their three other children. They also serve as a gift of hope to parents who have lost a child and as a guide for friends and family who don't know what to say when a loved one's child dies.
But the story of Gabriel doesn't end there. Gabriel's father is Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania. During the course of Gabriel's short life, Senator Santorum was the principal U.S. Senate sponsor of a bill to ban the practice of partial-birth abortion. The real life experiences of the Santorums take on an almost surreal dimension as abortion proponents publicly castigated those who argued that this brutal abortion technique is "needed" in order to prevent babies like Gabriel from being born.
Despite her abhorrence of "the terrible cold-blooded brutality" of partial-birth abortion, Karen Santorum always speaks in love and with deep compassion for anguished parents who have been counseled that they should abort their dying babies. She hopes Gabriel's story will offer them a life-affirming choice in which they too can cherish the memory of having loved and held their tiny, fragile child destined to die too soon.
Karen's last letter is dated October 12, 1997 - - one year and one day after Gabriel's birth and death. The Santorums had just learned that President Clinton had vetoed the partial-birth abortion ban for the second time. With the events of Gabriel's short life and death racing through her mind, one image recurs. Her husband was on the floor of the Senate, making an impassioned plea for the children whose lives are violently ended by partial-birth abortion. Pointing to a drawing of the procedure, he says loudly, "That is not a blob of tissue. It is a baby. It's a baby."
Just then, in a most uncommon occurrence in the United States Senate chamber, the cry of a baby rang out.
"A coincidence? A visiting baby?" writes Karen in her last letter to Gabriel, "Or maybe...it was a cry from the son whose voice we never heard, but whose life has forever changed ours.... I'll Always Love You, Mommy."
Letters to Gabriel is available from CCC of America (1-800-935-2222). $14.99/132 pages, with illustrations.