The Palin Pregnancy

Posted on September 1, 2008 in Campaign 2008 Sexuality

Sarah Palin is beginning to look like John McCain’s version of [[Thomas Eagleton]] — a liability who may get dropped before the final campaign even gets underway. The news that her seventeen year old daughter is pregnant speaks loads about the problems with the fundamentalist family model that the Palins feel that they represent.

No one should be telling Bristol Palin that she should or should not get an abortion, put the baby up for adoption or keep her. What the incident represents isn’t so much the failure of fundamentalist family planning but of fundamentalist sex education.

Studies show that adolescents who receive a sex education that includes contraception turn up unmarried and pregnant less and that they choose to put off having sex until later. Unprotected sex is more common among such young people because they have never been told how to protect themselves.

There is no better way to avoid a pregnancy than abstinence, I agree. But what about the backup plan? What about the details of reproduction itself? Smart, good parents realize that their children are beyond their control when they mix with their friends. They hand out facts and make the case for care, not based on some belief that exposing children to the facts of life will corrupt their souls, but on pragmatism. You tell your children to be sure that they have all the details for making an informed decision.

Unplanned pregnancy can happen even in the most conscientious families, but the point is that the world view that sex is part of life and needs to be understood for what it is works better than shuttering the eyes of young people by denying them access to comprehensive sex education. This question and not abortion should be the one we ask of Sarah Palin here. How complete a sex education are you going to promote in our schools and do you know the facts about what works or are you just running with an ideology that says no sex before marriage and if you do we’re not telling you how to protect yourself? Do we really want to say that pregnancy is woman’s special punishment?

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Addendum:

I’ve had misgivings about this post.

One of my main points of this article was that Bristol Palin retains the right to choice like every other teenaged mother. And she has exercised it by declaring that she will keep her baby.

The other point that I made really had little to do with her: what kind of sex education do we provide? I don’t think Sarah Palin wanted her child to become pregnant any more than any other mother would. If you provide narrow, abstinence-only sex education you’ll see this more often in the general population.

Who knows? Maybe Palin’s child will become a presidential candidate of a caliber akin to Obama? Our candidate has said to leave her alone and this will be my last on the topic. We should want the same dignity for Bristol Palin as we would Ann Dunham, aka Mrs. Barack Obama Sr.

[tags]Sarah Palin, sex education, family planning, Campaign 2008, John McCain, pregnancy, sexuality[/tags]