Double Standard

Okay – McCain’s veep choice is soon to become a grandmother, after recently giving birth to her own infant, who has Down Syndrome.

And she’s only been governor of Alaska for two years.

Wow, nothing going on in that woman’s life.

Seriously, though, I could care less about the decisions Sarah Palin makes for herself and her family. If she decided to give birth to her son despite the Down Syndrome diagnosis, that’s her choice. If her daughter is, at 17, having a baby and getting married because her family feels that is the right thing to do, that’s their choice.

Which is why it’s so fucking important to have that choice.

I don’t care what decision Sarah Palin made, what decision Bristol Palin is making, in that they don’t affect my own life one iota. But I support their right to CHOOSE.

Which is the whole point. The point that Anti-choice proponent Sarah Palin doesn’t seem to get.

The McCain-Palin campaign finally announced Bristol Palin’s pregnancy. Sarah made it clear that her daughter and the baby’s father were getting married and “going to grow up faster than (they had) ever planned.” Then they asked for the media to respect the family’s privacy regarding the matter.

The family’s privacy.

The president of the Christian Coalition of America (an anti-choice organization) said, “I think it’s a very private matter. It’s a matter that should stay in the family and they have to work through it together. My prayers go out to them.”

A matter that should stay in the family. A PRIVATE matter.

Unfortunately, if a 17-year-old woman in a similar situation as Bristol Palin wanted to have an abortion, it would be a public and, moreover, a governmental matter as far as Sarah Palin and John McCain are concerned. Dealing with teen pregnancy is a private family matter, as long as the family is making the PROPER and ACCEPTABLE decision.

In other words, as long as the pregnant teen was deciding to either keep her baby and marry the baby’s father, or give her baby up for adoption to a loving Christian home with a mother and a father.

The RIGHT decision.

There’s a lot of media hoopla right now about how the Democrats better not misstep regarding the Palin’s family situation, to avoid turning Bristol Palin into a sympathetic figure.

I think, however, it’s a perfect opportunity to emphasize how important it is that CHOICE is available to Bristol, and that it’s wonderful that she’s making the CHOICE that she’s making, but it should be her CHOICE and not something she’s forced into.

OH – and perhaps if Bristol Palin had been taught about contraception, she wouldn’t be 17 years old, pregnant and facing marriage to a man that she may not really love.

According to the dean of Liberty University School of Law: “We’re all sinners. We all make mistakes. Certainly, the ideal is not to get pregnant out of wedlock. But she made the right decision after her mistake.” (emphasis mine)

The RIGHT decision. The decision that happens to coincide with the beliefs of Christian Evangelicals. If she were to make the WRONG decision, well, it wouldn’t be seen as a mistake then. It would be grounds for McCain to drop Palin from the ticket almost as soon as she got there.

The spokesman for the McCain-Palin campaign said, “Life happens,” and that McCain’s view was that this is a private family matter.

Life happens all right. Especially when two young people aren’t taught that there are responsible ways to have sex if one chooses to have sex; that there are ways to help prevent not only pregnancy, but STDs.

And especially when the adults in the lives of these two young people are in such denial that sex is happening among teens, even teens from good Christian homes, that they teach only abstinence, to the peril of the teens involved.

Bristol Palin is fortunate that her family is well-off financially and well-educated. (That’s in all likelihood the truth for the father of the baby as well.) Bristol is fortunate that her family is going to help her through this “growing up experience.” She’s fortunate that her parents are kicking her out, or that her father didn’t beat the hell out of her when she told him she was pregnant at 17. She’s fortunate that she’ll likely still be able to go to college and achieve whatever dreams she wants to achieve because she comes from a family with money and influence.

In other words, Bristol Palin is fortunate that she is not like the majority of teens in this country who are having sex and getting pregnant too young. She has a situation that doesn’t necessitate abortion. She is an anomaly, and for Sarah Palin and John McCain to pretend that Bristol’s circumstances are anything like those of the majority of American teens, well, that just emphasizes how out of touch with reality they both are.

In other ways, Bristol Palin’s situation is unfortunate. It’s unfortunate that she likely isn’t being given a true choice thanks to the beliefs of her family, even though the US government, currently, still protects her right to choose whether or not to carry the pregnancy to term. It’s unfortunate that she feels the need to get married so soon and in order to prevent her from giving birth to the baby out of wedlock, when the odds are against such marriages succeeding, and when it likely isn’t her choice alone, but is happening under pressure of her family, and of the campaign.

Most of all, it’s unfortunate that Bristol’s childhood may be ending so abruptly thanks to the arrogance of her “teach only abstinence” mother and those like her. Because, yes, life happens and teens are GOING TO KEEP ON HAVING SEX OUT OF WEDLOCK regardless of whether the Religious Right wants to admit it. Teens are going to keep having sex, and are going to keep getting pregnant, and pretending it’s not happening isn’t going to make it go away. And forcing teens to make the RIGHT decision regarding an unplanned pregnancy also isn’t going to make the situation go away, no matter how hard you pray about it. It’s not even going to make the situation better.

And forcing women who might not be as fortunate as Sarah Palin where wealth and marriage and influence are concerned to have babies that are unplanned for, or are unable to be cared for properly due to circumstances, or are just plain unwanted…well, that’s not going to fix a damn thing either. Again, it’s fortunate for baby Trig that his parents will be able (hopefully) to care for him properly considering his having Down Syndrome. It’s fortunate for Trig and his parents and his siblings that they never have to worry about where their next meal is coming from, or how they are going to get Trig to the doctor’s appointments he will need should he have one of the common complications of those with Down Syndrome, or how they will pay for his healthcare and his care after their deaths, should he outlive them and not be completely self-sufficient, or how they will provide him with extra care to help him overcome his physical and cognitive disabilities, regardless of how mild or how severe they turn out to be.

I am NOT pro-abortion – I am STRONGLY pro-choice. I have thought many many times about what I might do if I were faced with the prospect of having a child with Down Syndrome or some other genetic condition that would make life challenging but not impossible. I don’t know what I would do, but I suspect that I would carry such a pregnancy to term and do the best that I could do. But I also have resources that many people in this country don’t have. And I certainly would NOT want to be told, upon diagnosis of a genetic defect in the fetus, that I was going to have to carry the pregnancy to term because, despite the ability of many physicians in this country to perform a safe abortion, the government had mandated that the rights of a fetus that wasn’t even viable outweighed my rights.

There are many what-ifs in such a situation. What if my child was born severely disabled and I abandoned the child to grow up in an institution because such children are rarely adopted? What if I didn’t have the resources to make a life for a child with even mild disabilities because I lived in a rural area with little access to proper healthcare and no access to special education? What if the birth defects that my child was born with could have been prevented had I had access to adequate prenatal care or pre-pregnancy nutrition (as is the case in a number of premature births and neural tube defects that occur in poor communities)?

What if?

What if the very people who want to end safe and legal abortion, prevent access to proven methods of birth control, and prevent the teaching of anything but abstinence in our schools figured out a way to take care of all those babies and children who currently sit in the foster care system and children’s homes, and in some cases hospitals, instead of trying so hard to protect the non-sentient, non-viable fetuses out there?

Why are there so many people from the Religious Right protesting at Planned Parenthood and abortion clinics, and so few of those same people lobbying the government for better healthcare, more effective foster care programs, adoption reform, support for teen parents, laws that support working mothers, etc. etc. so on and so forth? Why do they only care about the “babies” before they get here and forget about them once they are born?

Why are the media and the Democrats not raising this question more and more, and forcing the anti-choice, pro-abstinence, anti-birth control, conservative Republican Religious Right to put their money where their mouth is?

Best wishes for a healthy pregnancy and birth with proper prenatal care and a well-trained and accessible obstetrician to Bristol Palin. Best wishes for a happy and healthy life to little Trig Palin and the unborn Palin grandchild, with well-baby checks, cautious and attentive pediatricians, wonderful teachers, food in their little bellies every day and night, soft comfortable beds to sleep in, safe toys to play with, and all the benefits one could wish for when growing up.

Now let’s respect Bristol’s privacy, as should be the case, but use this whole thing as an opportunity to point out the double standard of the “haves” and the “have nots” among those in the Republican party. Sarah Palin is a card-carrying, caribou-hunting, good ol’ boy (ahem) member of the NRA. She’s a (supposedly) breastfeeding mom with a special needs infant who supports a fetus’ right to be born at any cost and the rights of women to have it all after the baby is born – because, once the baby is born, the mom’s rights to work and succeed at the expense of her children outweigh the rights of the infant to bond with and be cared for by its mother – it’s only when it’s a not-yet-viable fetus that its rights outweigh those of its mother. Most importantly, Sarah Palin is a Christian who doesn’t understand what the words “separation of church and state” mean, and who doesn’t care if she ruins the habitat of countless animals in the wild so long as gas prices drop thanks to drilling in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge. I mean, it won’t matter anyway, once Jesus comes back and takes all the true believers with Him, right? Let the earth go to hell in a handbasket, it’s gonna be cleansed with fire next time anyway, and all the important people will have been sucked up into the Kingdom of Heaven…

cars without drivers will be careening all over the road, assuming you had the “don’t be mistaken, my true treasure lies in Heaven” bumpersticker on it…

airplanes will crash, unless the pilot is a heathen who never went to church a day in his life and never accepted Christ as his personal Lord and Savior…

gas prices will rise to astronomical … oh, wait, gas prices will drop because we all know that most gas is produced by non-Christian nations with heathen workers, so, once the saved folks have been sucked up to Heaven, there will be more to go around…hmmm…