Throughout the book, Senator Santorum reveals a thoughtful and intelligent engagement with the most basic issues of political theory, conservative political philosophy, and the social impact of culture. He writes personally and sensitively of his own observations and about how threatening social realities have affected his own family and the way he and his wife raise their children.

When addressing issues as sensitive as abortion, Santorum is able to write about the danger abortion poses to our "moral ecology," even as he provides an insider's view of how he became involved in the partial-birth abortion issue. Movingly, he writes of abortion as "a toxin methodically polluting our fragile moral ecosystem." As he laments, "It poisons everyone it touches, from the mother and her ill-fated child, to the mother's and father's families, to the abortion provider, to each of us who stands as a silent witness to this destruction and debasement of human life."

Even more movingly, he wrote of the experience he and his wife shared as they were told by a doctor that their unborn child was afflicted with a fatal birth defect and would surely die. He writes, "That wasn't the news we wanted or expected, but I must tell you that our reaction, after the shock and grief, was not to avoid the pain, the cost, or the struggle; it was not to get rid of the 'problem,' and it was not to take a baby out of his misery like something that was less than human. Karen and I couldn't rationalize how we could treat this little human life at twenty weeks' gestation in the womb any different than one twenty weeks old after birth. At either age, he is helpless, unaware, and thoroughly dependent on us, his parents, to protect him, care for him, and love him unconditionally." Gabriel Michael Santorum, who died just two hours after his birth, was treated as a human being rather than something less than human, and his life and death testify of the irreducible but vulnerable reality of human dignity.

It Takes a Family is an important book for our troubled times. Its emergence can bring only good things for the conservative movement in America. If every public servant was this clear-headed and intellectually courageous, we would see a very different culture.

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R. Albert Mohler, Jr. is president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. For more articles and resources by Dr. Mohler, and for information on The Albert Mohler Program, a daily national radio program broadcast on the Salem Radio Network, go to www.albertmohler.com . For information on The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, go to www.sbts.edu . Send feedback to mail@albertmohler.com .

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