I’ve watched some of the media people yammer on about Sarah Palin’s teenage daughter being pregnant and asking generic questions like “how will this impact McCain’s campaign?”
The problem is, this is the wrong question to ask.
How will the pregnancy itself impact the campaign. Well it shouldn’t impact it at all.
However, that doesn’t mean some of the cirumstances around the pregnancy can’t be brought up. For example:
1) How much did McCain know and when did he know it? This is a line of questioning that the media has pursued a little, and it’s important because, if McCain didn’t even know a little thing like that when he decided on Palin, then that would be confirmation that he did absolutely zero vetting on her whatsoever before hand. That would spell serious implications on his ability to make sound and informed judgements about situations instead of just riding by the seat of his pants.
2) Why are Sarah Palin’s statements about the pregnancy inconsistent with her policy positions. This is what I mean:
When they announced the pregnancy yesterday, Sarah Palin released a statement stating in part:
We’re proud of Bristol’s decision to have her baby
Now, the ironic part of this statement is that, based on Palin’s policy positions, she doesn’t even think that her daughter should be able to make a choice in the matter. As I’ve brought up earlier, Palin opposes abortion in all cases except for the life of the mother (not even for rape or incest), so if Sarah Palin had her way, Bristol would never have a “decision” on whether to have her baby – she would be forced to have it whether she wanted to or not. (as a side note, admittedly, 5 months into the pregnancy would be a pretty late time to thinka about having an abortion, but presumably she made this “decision” much earlier.)
Setting the arguments over the abortion debate aside for the moment, don’t you think it’s odd that Sarah Palin is lauding a decision that she doesn’t think her daughter should even be given?
I should note that Palin also supports parental consent laws, though in this case it wouldn’t impact her daughter since the law struck down in Alaska (which Palin supported) applied only to teens under 16, since the age of consent in Alaska is 16.
Update
Oh yeah, I almost forgot. Palin also supports abstinence-only education. So how did that work out?
Another question no one is asking: why did Palin feel it was necessary to ‘out’ her daughter in order to establish her own maternity back in May?
There are better ways for her to prove that she was the mother– birth certificates, affidavits, whatever. Instead, we got this weird explanation that consists of, ‘well, it couldn’t be her because she’s pregnant right now!’