NARAL Pro-Choice America released a sampling of recent votes that prove Santorum's relentless hostility toward birth control, including votes to cut off birth-control funding to poor women overseas and to block a program that would require insurance companies that cover Viagra to pay for birth control too. Santorum’s latest rant against birth control came on "Nitebeat," a Comcast network public affairs program that airs in New England. http://santorumexposed.com/serendipity/archives/49-Birth-Control-Harms- Women.html

"Senator Santorum tells American women that by acting responsibly and using birth control they are doing something bad for the country," said Nancy Keenan, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America. "Senator Santorum's senseless comments are even more ludicrous because Americans recognize that increasing access to birth control is a common-sense, common-ground way to prevent unintended pregnancies and reduce the need for abortion."

Santorum has also criticized the decision in the landmark Supreme Court case Griswold v. Connecticut--which struck a state ban on birth control usage by married couples under a right to privacy. "It all comes from," Santorum told the Baltimore Sun , "this right to privacy that doesn't exist, in my opinion, in the United States Constitution, this right that was created, it was created in Griswold - Griswold was the contraceptive case - and abortion." [The Baltimore Sun, April 26, 2003]

Keenan also pointed out that Santorum's claim, on the same program, to have supported birth-control legislation does not match reality. In recent years Santorum has voted nearly a dozen times against birth control – and has failed to cosponsor a single piece of pro-birth-control legislation. Following is a small sampling of the anti-birth control votes the junior senator from Pennsylvania has recently cast.

• Sen. Santorum voted "no" on a budget amendment for contraceptive equity and other family-planning services (3/17/2005).
• Sen. Santorum voted "no" on a "prevention package" amendment to the Federal Abortion Ban that included contraceptive equity, other birth-control measures, and an expansion of the Children’s Health Insurance Program – which provides health care to poor, uninsured children (3/11/03).
• Sen. Santorum has voted repeatedly for the global gag rule, a policy that denies U.S. family-planning aid to overseas health clinics in the world’s poorest regions (most recent vote: 4/5/2005).
• Sen. Santorum has voted repeatedly to cancel U.S. funding to the United Nations Population Fund, which provides birth control and other basic health services – but not abortion – to the world’s poorest women (most recent vote: 4/28/98).