Michael picked up on this report on Santorum’s early political career (the article’s title is at the top of this post):
They [the authors of the story] found a December 1995 interview with Philadelphia Magazine where Santorum admitted he had been basically pro-choice until he got into politics.
Elsewhere in the original 1995 article, it describes Santorum’s evolving politics:
He has forgone a past that was unexaminedly moderate for a platform that is unexaminedly conservative, including reversing, rather quietly, his pro-choice stance on abortion.
Another anecdote about Santorum’s earlier involvement in Republican politics confirms this picture:
It was the dawn of the 1980s, and the Reagan Revolution was stirring. But Santorum was not yet politically impassioned, and what political orientation he did have was quite moderate. “There was a Youth for Reagan group on campus, but Rick shunned them,” remembers a friend who was active with him in the Pennsylvania College Republican organization. “He always described them as right-wing fringe. But I don’t think he gave it much thought. Through three years in the College Republicans with Rick, I never heard him actually discuss issues.”
It makes it a little easier to understand why Santorum wouldn’t have had too much difficulty endorsing Arlen Specter’s presidential bid in the same year.
IanH 
tbraton 
Back on January 8, Rod Dreher had a blog criticizing Eugene Robinson for remarks he made in his column about the Santorums’ “weird behavior” in bringing home the corpse of their 5-month old “still-born baby” so their other kids could play with it and they could sleep with it. http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/2012/01/08/anti-santorum-sickos/ In the course of responding to Dreher’s blog, I was challenged by another poster, which forced me to do some research, and I came across an article that appeared in 2005 in the Philadelphia City Paper. http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/2012/01/08/anti-santorum-sickos/#comment-59966 (my reply made the erroneous assumption that Karen Santorum was 10 years older than she actually is).
This later article is notable for two things. First, it reveals that Rick Santorum’s conversion to strong opponent of abortion occurred in his late 20′s as he prepared to run for the U.S. House of Representatives and that his female Catholic relatives were appalled by the change in his stance. Second, his wife Karen had lived for six years starting in her early 20′s with an abortion doctor who was not only 40+ years her senior but the doctor who had delivered her as a baby. About a week after my reply to Dreher’s blog, Newsweek ran an article repeating the same allegations. http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/01/15/mrs-santorum-s-abortion-doctor-boyfriend.html
From my January 11 reply to Dreher’s blog:
“The article in the Philadelphia paper also had some interesting revelations about Rick Santorum. After noting that Santorum and his wife only became devout Catholics after meeting each other (“born again Catholics,” so to speak), the article goes on to state:
“Santorum’s views on abortion changed around this time as well, recalls the cousin.
“Our extended family has many strong women in it, who are intelligent and outspoken. There was one year Rick stopped by a family reunion for an hour or two. It was around the time he was ‘rising to power’ and becoming rabidly, ridiculously conservative. His views on abortion were quite contentious that year, and for those few hours of his visit, the women all descended upon him like flies, calling him on his change of views. He had always been pro-choice to my recollection. That’s why it was such a heated issue that year. The women in my family felt betrayed.”
Santorum spends a full chapter of his book discussing his personal evolution in abortion.
“I was very much like most Americans and most nominal Catholics before I decided to enter public life,” he writes. “I didn’t like the idea of abortion — I knew it was wrong, but I wasn’t sure if it was the government’s business to do anything about it.”
After deciding to run for office in 1989, Santorum says that he studied scientific and ethical literature on abortion. Plus, he writes, “one should never underestimate the influence of a spouse in politics.” He came to the firm conclusion that “abortion was the taking of an innocent life.” ”
So it appears that Santorum changed his views on abortion about the time he decided to run for political office in his early 30?s because he obviously thought it would help his chances of winning office in a socially conservative and heavily Catholic district. That seems very much like the “flip-fop” he accuses Romney of and certainly gives the lie to his claim that he has always strongly opposed abortion. Do I detect the whiff of hypocrisy emanating from the Santorum family?”
It appears, in short, that Rick Santorum was Mitt Romney before Mitt Romney became Mitt Romney.
BTW I find it interesting that the MSM have generally ignored the explosive story re Karen Santorum’s living for six years with an abortion doctor, while devoting a lot of attention to Mitt Romney taking his dog on vacation 30 years ago in a cage attached to the roof of the family car. Gail Collins, the liberal columnist for the NY Times, has written at least 3 columns in the past 5 months in which she has dropped a reference to Romney’s dog on the car roof. In fact, she was on Morning Joe on Monday and dropped an allusion to the dog story. Yet I cannot recall one column Collins has written referring to Karen Santorum’s unusual living arrangement with the abortion doctor.