Women's Issue

Sarah Palin and her church and her pastor have made themselves abundantly clear on issues of reproductive privacy -- there won't be any. In a Palin world, if my daughter wanted birth control, she wouldn't be able to get any, and if I wanted sex education to be taught in my son's school, I would be out of luck. If a girl I knew were raped and impregnated by her uncle and she elected to have an abortion, she would not be allowed to do so. She wouldn't even be allowed to take the morning after pill in case he got her pregnant. Maybe there's something you guys don't get about this. Bristol Palin's pregnancy is at the heart of what women and the right wing have been fighting over for thirty years, and it isn't abortion, it's privacy and the right to control your own reproductive choices. There will always be abortion, and there will always be choice, but Palin would like the choice to be illegal and punishable. Same with birth control.

I like you, Barack, but you don't get it either. The issues of birth control and abortion have been made into public issues by the right wing, and millions of women and girls have suffered because the right wing wants to impose its ideas of what women should do upon every woman in America including those who don't share and have never shared their values. So, Barack, I suggest that you, as a man, should do the backing off.

Bristol Palin's pregnancy, which her mother has known about for months, is at the heart of this battle. It has been shown over and over that abstinence education doesn't work, while sex education does work. Do I accept that teenagers have sex? You bet I do, and I tell the ones I have borne how to make it safe and what to watch out for and be careful of, girls and boys. Sarah Palin, for whatever reason, did not do the same thing, and yet she presumes, PRESUMES, to tell me as a mother and a woman what I can and cannot do with my body, and what I can and cannot provide for my children.

Sarah Palin has constructed her appeal to the right wing around this "social conservatism" in exactly the same way that John McCain has constructed his appeal around his aggressive foreign policy views. Both are equally political, and as political as Cheney's ideas about the unitary executive, for example. Women are citizens, too, and our privacy is a political football, and has been used as such to win elections for a generation, so I supposed you mean well, you guys who are telling me to back off, but you don't get it. So shut up.

Comments

[bgregs]

What, exactly, has Obama been doing? The only thing that he's done that could be considered wrong about it would be to claim that the states should make their own choices. Other than that he's all for allowing those who want their kids to have access to sex ed to do so, and those who want their kids to be able to have safer sex objects to do so, and those who get to the point of needing an abortion to do so. But at the same time, he doesn't want to force anyone to have any of these if we don't want them!

[Heavenhelpusall]

Barack did not ask us to leave the issue alone, just the teen. But in my world, you don't get it either. This is a cover-up to cover-up the cover-up. This balloon was floated to distract us from the lie McToken told when she faked her (Bristol's) pregnancy last spring. I sense this pregnancy will not come to term but we would have accepted the notion of a VP with a teen mother.

McNixon and crew are playing a shell game. Who's Trig's mama?

[Lane]

If the American people vote in McCain/Palin NOW after all that has been exposed about them both, I'll be busy working on my handbasket.

[Appalled]

Thank you, thank you.

What happens in Sarah Palin's family and sex life should be none of my business.

What happens in my family and sex life should be none of HER OR JOHN MCCAIN'S business! But they certainly are determined to get involved, aren't they?

[PumaAnn]

I don't believe her daughter's decision has whit to do with this issue. It's her daughter's decision. Her response, to back her daughter, would be similar whether you're conservative or liberal.

Then again, maybe I'm wrong. Perhaps liberal parents would NOT be supportive.

[stamper]

Eloquent, intelligent essay as usual. Interestingly enough, i live in a small rural community with the largest teen pregnancy rate in the state. Of all my daughter's friends families, we were easily the most open, progressive, liberal and secular. My daughter was the last one of her friends to be sexually active, way past her 18 birthday and then chose to do so in a responsible thoughtful way within a long term committed relationship using disease risk reduction and birth control. She and her friends often came to me , to ask questions usually of a sex health related issue because they knew they would get honest, open accurate information with appropriate moral advice, but that they could count on me to help them without judging them. Let's make abortion unnecessary, not illegal!

[lovetheworld]

"So, Barack, I suggest that you, as a man, should do the backing off.":

How has Barack Obama used the issue of Bristol's pregnancy for political gain? He hasn't. As for just simply talking about it, well, he has every right to to as a human being, and as a husband, and father to two young daughters.

Obama will continue to talk about this issue, and has been on the right side of this issue from day 1.

So, are you getting it Jane?