Bristol Palin's pregnancy none of our business, but Sarah Palin's views are
ST. PAUL, Minn. -- Perhaps Bristol Palin planned to have a baby at 17. Perhaps she didn't. Either way, it's none of my business.
But when the news broke that the teenage daughter of Gov. Sarah Palin, the GOP's vice presidential candidate, is five months pregnant, I heard it more as a mother than a reporter.
Even with a loving, supportive family, a kid having a kid has a hard road. And with the whole world watching, it must be harder still. For her. And for her mother.
Sarah Palin "has the same concerns and issues as any mother of teenage girls across the world, not the country, the world," said a sympathetic Bobbie Peterson, Illinois GOP vice chair on the convention floor Monday.
Add mothers of teenage boys to that.
Over the years, there have been many conversations in our house about sex, babies and birth control. One of them took place at the dinner table when our now-22-year-old-son was just 15.
"If you think you're ready for sex, are you ready for a baby?" I remember half-asking, half-demanding. "Are you ready to raise a child?"
Support a child? Support the mother of that child? Would you consider adoption? Would you consider abortion?"
Sex is easy. The rest is not.
Bristol Palin is a private person with a public mother.
We have no right invading this young woman's life. But we have every right and responsibility in this presidential campaign to question John McCain and Sarah Palin about the Bush administration's attack on family planning and how, if at all, they would change it.
As Katha Pollitt noted Aug. 11 in the Nation: "Last month, the Department of Health and Human Services issued a draft of new regulations that would require health-care providers who receive federal funds to accept as employees nurses and other workers who object to abortion and even to most kinds of birth control . . . this respect for moral beliefs only goes one way. A Catholic hospital has no obligation to hire pro-choice workers or accommodate their moral beliefs by permitting them to offer emergency contraception to rape victims or hand out condoms to the HIV-positive. . . . Only anti-choicers, apparently, have moral beliefs that entitle them to jobs they refuse to actually perform."
Terry Cosgrove, the president and CEO of Personal PAC, a bipartisan, pro-choice political action committee, put it even more directly. "Bush, he's been horrible. . . . In the last two weeks, they have attempted to redefine the birth control pill and the IUD as equal to an abortion so that Title X family planning money can't be used to distribute birth control."
Choice means deciding to take a pregnancy to full term as Bristol Palin has. Choice means deciding not to. Choice means full access to legal contraception.
Sarah Palin is courting female voters. She needs to talk to women about this.