Karen Santorum"s Abortion Provider Boyfriend

When I came across this story I had to laugh at how some of the untethered Bible beaters may react: Karen Santorum had a six year affair with an obstetrician and abortion provider who was 40 years her senior. It will also be interesting to watch how Rick "Frothy Mix" Santorum spins it all if the story gets any traction. Yes, people can genuinely change their views, but one has to wonder how Ms. Santorum managed such a dramatic about face. Is she now trying to atone for her past or what? Nothing gets me more riled up than the hypocrisy of so many of the far right - not to mention how they conveniently forget their past as they grovel for the support of the haters and those who joyfully embrace ignorance. Here are highlights from The Daily Beast:

Karen Santorum, the ultra-pro-life wife and mother of seven home-schooled children, has been the perfect complement to her husband, Rick, as he chases the Republican presidential nomination. On the campaign trail, the candidate often refers to her book, Letters to Gabriel, the story of the devoutly Catholic couple’s traumatic late-term 1997 miscarriage . . . . . The couple opposes birth control as well as abortion, even in cases of rape.

But Mrs. Santorum, 51, apparently wasn’t always committed to the cause. In fact, her live-in partner through most of her 20s was Tom Allen, a Pittsburgh obstetrician and abortion provider 40 years older than she, who remains an outspoken crusader for reproductive rights and liberal ideals.

[H]e - [Allen] - lives with his wife of 16 years, Judi . . . . in the same large detached row house where he lived with the woman who would become Santorum’s wife. He and Garver also lived for several years in another house a few blocks away. “Karen had no problems with what I did for a living,” says Allen, who helped start one of the first hospital-sanctioned abortion clinics in Pennsylvania.

The six-year-long May-December affair, which was always out in the open, began in 1982, when Garver was a 22-year-old nursing student at Duquesne University. Allen was then 63. He was well known for delivering babies and helping to start a “therapeutic abortion” clinic at Magee-Womens Hospital in Pittsburgh years before Roe v. Wade. . . Rick Santorum has lampooned the notion that abortion statutes should contain exceptions in cases where women’s health is at risk.

Garver’s parents were scandalized by the pairing, which strained their relationship with their daughter, according to Allen’s youngest daughter, Candy, who, at 51, is the same age as Mrs. Santorum. (Karen’s parents did not return calls requesting comment.) His own children weren’t too happy either but bore it largely in silence.

The Greenbergs say Allen happily gave Karen a cultural education. When she told him she wanted to learn to play the piano, he bought her a Steinway upright (which still stands in his living room). He took her to Europe several times as well as to Hong Kong for the wedding of one of his friends. In 1983, the couple went to France to visit Candy and one of her older sisters, who were traveling around Europe after college.

The unlikely couple broke up in 1988. “Karen wanted to have children, and that was something I had already done,” Allen says. There were no hard feelings; she told him to keep the piano.

Around that time, she met her future husband when he recruited her as a summer intern for his law firm; he too hadn’t been much of a practicing Catholic, but that changed soon after they married in 1990. They immediately started a family; Karen never practiced law. Her husband ran for Congress, and by the mid-1990s he was among the most fervent anti-abortion legislators in the House of Representatives. Her law-school friend the social-justice lawyer ran into Karen Santorum on Capitol Hill around then. “She greeted me warmly,” he recalls, “but I got the idea that she wasn’t allowed to embrace me or anything. By that point she was dressed like Hester Prynne.”

One has to wonder which is the real Karen Santorum. Did she change to further Frothy Mix's political career or what? It's a very strange transformation.Sort of like Newt Gingrich now claiming to be a champion of the "sanctity of marriage" after two divorces and numerous adulterous affairs.