Over at Slate, Will Saletan does some back-of-the-envelope calculation and concludes that it is "almost inconceivable" that some past Presidential daughter didn't have a secret abortion, and then suggests that Sarah Palin is "the candidate who didn't get rid of the mess." Wow. Besides the fact that he has no proof except for probability, loose at best, how does this advance the conversation about Palin or anything else that women do in politics, except to issue a blanket and irrefutable charge of hypocrisy and condemn women who do make the choice to have an abortion? I think Palin's daughter's decision to keep her baby is admirable, so long as it was the daughter's choice, and really has nothing to do with the election -- it's Sarah Palin's public record that is at issue.
On the other hand, Tim Rutten makes the real point about Palin's background: Her policies would deny other women the chance to make their own choices, the way she did:
That said, the fact of Bristol Palin's situation and the way in which she and her family have chosen to deal with it are legitimate issues, because they involve public policy issues on which Sarah Palin, candidate for vice president, has taken political positions. Palin, for example, opposes sex education in schools, including all access to contraceptive information for adolescents. Similarly, she believes that abortion should be illegal.
... When Sarah Palin and her husband discovered that their unborn son would be born with Down syndrome, they were free to make the decision that she would carry their boy to term. When they found that their 17-year-old daughter was pregnant by her high school boyfriend, they were free to reach a decision that the daughter, too, would keep her child and that she and the boy would marry.
...The point is that the Palins were able to make all these decisions according to the dictates of their own consciences, formed by their own religious convictions, within the privacy of their own family and according to its values and traditions. What they decided is nobody's business but theirs; the fact that they were free to arrive at their own decision is everybody's business.... The particular brand of social conservatism in which Sarah Palin quite evidently believes deeply would deny other American families and other American women the freedom to make these same intimate decisions according to the dictates of their own consciences, religious convictions and traditions.
It's not about what Palin decided. It's about how the policies Palin supports will rob other women of their rights to make their own decisions.
--Tim Fernholz
