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Palin pregnancy puts abortion on election map
Read the article / show / issue that provoked me to write a letter and my response below that or go straight to my response
Date Posted on this Site
September 4, 2008
Publication
Toronto Star
Publication Date
September 2, 2008
Published Content
ROSIE DIMANNO
ST. PAUL–Baby mamas: Probably not what Republicans were expecting from their prospective Second Family.
A bun in the Easy Bake oven, oh Lord.
All those children looked good on Sarah Palin when the attractive Alaska governor was first trotted out by John McCain as his audacious choice for running mate, both American parties vying for family values distinction.
A five-pack of kids, from infant to 19-year-old son about to ship out for Iraq, as wholesome and virtuous an image as could be desired.
From a socially conservative GOP prospective – the party base, as everyone keeps saying – such values would probably include abstinence for young teenage daughters, insofar as these things can possibly be imposed.
Turns out Palin is about to become a grandma in ... about four months. Her 17-year-old daughter Bristol, as the family confirmed in a statement released yesterday, is pregnant. The girl plans to keep the baby and wed the father – yet another teenage marriage springing from unplanned pregnancy. Too young to vote for her mom but old enough to make babies, take a spouse, grow up real fast.
On Day 1 of what was already an extraordinary convention, politicking allegedly kept to a minimum at least until Hurricane Gustav exhausts itself in the Gulf states, the buzz was suddenly about a private family matter exposed by blogging boobs, Palin and her husband forced to dispel vicious Internet rumours – that the couple's youngest, a boy born with Down syndrome in April, was actually Bristol's baby, the secret hidden in a switcheroo domestic cover-up.
Team McCain quickly announced the presumptive presidential nominee knew all about Bristol's pregnancy and the fact of it was irrelevant. Democratic contender Barack Obama, to his credit, reminded that he was the son of a teenage mother, declared children off limits in a political campaign and warned reporters to back off the story.
Well, of course it's a private matter, and Bristol Palin is not the one running for office, her own life caught up in the vortex of an election campaign. But there's no privacy in politics, not when such details reflect directly on values espoused by the candidate-parent.
Sarah Palin does not favour access to contraceptives in schools, is no fan of sex ed (would also like to see creationism taught alongside science in the classroom) and is passionately anti-choice, even when pregnancy results from rape and accepts abortion only when the life of the mother is in physical danger.
Now that the dilemma has come right into the heart of her household, she has displayed no hypocrisy as, indeed, she cleaved to her views when discovering that she was carrying a baby with a serious genetic condition.
All of this earned Palin much sympathy here yesterday, with delegates and beyond – evangelicals applauding Bristol's "choice," though some did make reference to forgiving the "sinner," when they're not so quick to forgive "sinners" who aren't related to the Republican vice-presidential nominee
Palin and her husband professed their unconditional love and pride in Bristol, which was hardly necessary. No one doubts they love their daughter, even with an expanding waistline. But pride? Where does pride fit in here – that a 17-year-old is predisposed, probably because of her family's influence, to bring a baby into the world, accepting but surely not grasping all the difficulties it will likely entail, even with a supportive family?
McCain's VP selection energized the party, even as many were scratching their heads over the merits of this largely inexperienced 44-year-old politician unknown outside Alaska, a reformer often at odds – as McCain also has been – with senior touts in her party. McCain broke with convention to tag a woman, one from way outside the Beltway, in her first gubernatorial term and with no expertise in foreign policy – putting a raw rookie one heartbeat away from the White House, should Republicans prevail. That effectively took the edge off McCain's primary criticism of Obama as too scrubeenie for the Oval Office.
Was this all simply about a view to a womb, getting a dame on the ticket? Because this aspiring VP, whatever her personal charm and energy, could not possibly be more unacceptable a choice to those 18 million women who voted for Hillary Clinton in the primaries, if anyone thought Palin might inherit those ballots. She's a right-wing man in a skirt and fetching up-do.
More obviously, McCain was appealing to the extremities of his own party, shoring up weaknesses in his electoral base, giving righteous Republicans – many who'd claimed they would not vote for him, herded into the anti-McCain movement by ultra-conservative commentators – a reason to forgive some of his heretical positions.
It is a risky gambit – gains made in the reactionary realm offset by losses among independents and moderate Democrats.
A gun-toting hockey mom brought colourful character to the ticket. But McCain surely never wanted abortion to become a defining issue in this election.
Too bad there's no morning-after pill for poor political judgment.
My Response Letter
Here is the truth of those who support abortion and so-called "choice": you are a woman with a choice, unless you choose to have five kids, even if one of them has Down Syndrome, and to teach your children that life is sacred and express pride in them when they decide not to kill their unborn child. Then, of course, you are "a right-wing man in a skirt and fetching up-do."
Shame on Ms. DiManno. I thought she believed in women's rights.
Jason Gennaro
Was my response published?
No