Politics and Pregnancy

When I heard that the Republican VP nominee, Palin, has a pregnant teenage daughter, I was disappointed and upset in an indefinable way. I have been turning this over in my head for the past few days, and I'm still having a hard time expressing my emotions over this, but I am writing this to clarify, to myself, and make the connections I think need to be made.

Bristol Palin is 17 and pregnant. Her family says they are supportive and looking forward to her new baby and her upcoming wedding to her (also teenage) boyfriend. This is a family who is very publicly pro-abstinence and anti-abortion, so naturally they are going to expect Bristol to bear her unplanned child and marry the baby daddy. No one asks Bristol what it was she wanted, or says the thing I wanted to know -- how could she be so stupid? Hasn't she heard of birth control? Where were her parents?


For the record: I am vigorously pro-choice, but I am personally anti-abortion. Just because I don't want one for myself doesn't mean it's any of my business what other women do. Personally I think better sex ed and free access to birth control would be a better solution that the jack-ass idea of abstinence. You can see how well that worked for the Palin family.


I know it's not her parents fault, of course -- our culture has been turning to a celebration of baby-ness for several years (from my childhood when a young woman unfeelingly told me that she would never bring children into such an awful world). Girl-child-celebrities are having babies left and right with disposable (and sometimes invisible) daddies. Many are excellent parents, but they have staff, money and privilege. Many are terrible parents, and parenthood seems to cause emotional and mental meltdowns (like the over-examined Britney Spears). Being pregnant and sexy seems to be the career goal for more and more young women. I'm disappointed. I took parenthood seriously, just as seriously as I took my career. I feel these young women are returning us to a pre-feminist expectation that a woman's best goal is becoming a baby factory. It's as if the gains of women over the past century to be taken seriously as human beings with souls and brains have been thrown out in favor of being vagina's and wombs.

When I was in the hospital after delivering Sabine last fall, my day nurse came in at one point and started telling me how she had been gushing about us to all the other nurses in the ward: we were nice, happy to have a baby, married .... What? Is that unusual, I asked? Oh yes, she said, at least half of her patients were unmarried, most of the babies were unplanned. I asked a few other nurses I know, and got the same story. I was startled.

I'm not suggesting that I think you must be married to have children, but it seems a foolish thing to do. Having children is a choice you cannot take back, you cannot change. Babies are blessings, but they are also heartbreak and work. In a GOP world without affordable and easy access to healthcare, pre-natal checkups for single and young mothers becomes more complicated and less likely. Single mothers may have extended family nearby to help out (a luxury I do not have), but they do not have the partner who can help out at 3 am when the baby won't stop crying, or who can let them have some needed time to themselves, a partner who has an interest in her children as well as her. Babies are expensive -- most children born to unwed mothers grow up in poverty, and children who grow up in poverty, with under-educated parents, generally do not do as well academically as their more affluent classmates.

And at the same time that we are being treated to the spectacle of Bristol Palin, we are also hearing over and over about Casey Anthony, the young single mother who is suspected of murdering her 3 year old daughter, Caylee. I'd like to highlight the facts that Casey was single, and teen aged when she gave birth to Caylee, that Casey mother prevented her from giving up Caylee for adoption. We don't know if Casey considered an abortion. I'd like to stop for a moment and consider the similarities, the heartbreak of an unplanned and unwanted child.