“We may not agree on abortion, but surely we can all agree on reducing the number of unintended pregnancies”. These words, spoken by Barack Obama, took on an ironic meaning yesterday when it was announced that Bristol Palin, the unmarried teen age daughter of Sarah Palin, the presumptive Republican candidate for vice president was five months pregnant.
Integrity demands that we are cautious in using other people’s lives to prove our political points or in drawing conclusions about why Bristol Palin got pregnant. We simply do not know if Sarah Palin’s politics caused Bristol Palin’s pregnancy. Compassion and respect for the dignity of persons demands that commentary strive to avoid hurting others. But commentary on the life decisions of those who have chosen to be in the public eye is not off limits. In fact, it is an essential component of how we learn. We learn in part from analyzing the decisions others make. Our children learn from how we explain decisions our leaders make. We learn when we think about the decisions others make. It is too facile to declare discourse about the Palin situation off limits and say that whatever decision a woman makes is ipso facto the right decision. Some decisions are good and result in health and happiness; others turn out unhappily, analyzing those choices helps develop policy that is sensitive to facilitating good choices.
Bristol Palin has the right – and the responsibility - to make her decision about this pregnancy, but knowing whether it is the right decision is beyond our capacity to determine. Her parents have the right and the responsibility to guide her in that decision and those of us who are pro-choice would hope that she had full information on all the options available including abortion, not marrying and raising the child herself, adoption, and marriage and child bearing. We cannot, however, impose the duty of full disclosure on her parents. We can comment on what we think is ethical parental behavior and the elements that go into good decision making about reproduction. The personal is political and reproduction is a private act with public consequences.
Unwanted pregnancies happen to teens who had great sex education and those who had none. Sex and desire are messy, unpredictable and consequences are forgotten in the heat of passion. They even happen to well educated, sophisticated adults like Rielle Hunter.
Obama’s words and approach to abortion are, however, in sharp contrast to that of Sarah Palin who describes herself as a “feminist for life” and is a member of the organization with the same name. I would contend that Obama’s who, as far as I know, has never called himself a feminist is more in keeping with feminist theories and values regarding sexuality, gender and reproduction than Sarah Palin. In focusing on reducing unintended pregnancy rather than making abortion illegal, Obama reflects the feminist value of providing women with the choices they want – and not becoming pregnant when you are not ready to have a child is high on women’s wish lists.
Feminists for Life, on the other hand, have shown little interest in responding to women’s expressed needs. “Preconception issues” such as contraception and abstinence are not their concern. Their mission is to “serve” women who are “already pregnant” In fact, their legislative program is almost totally focused on the Elizabeth Cady Stanton bill, a little known measure that would provide modest funding to colleges for resources to help pregnant women stay in college.
From a feminist perspective this approach misses the mark. The women’s health movement spent the 60’s and 70’s working to change cultural and medical values so that women would be treated as full persons, not as uterine containers for babies. FFL would have us return to a time in which women’s sexuality is denied and they are seen only through the lens of motherhood. Sarah Palin seems to have bought into this model both in her opposition to comprehensive sexuality education and in her approach to her daughter’s pregnancy. The solution to an unintended pregnancy is to transform it into and unintended and perhaps unwise marriage.
For FFL and Palin, women’s natural role is motherhood; while it may be premature for that to occur to a high school senior; it is simply the early adoption of her purpose in life. Likewise women are by nature more peace loving and self sacrificing; thus to surrender to a pregnancy is what a good woman does. In this context, one can deny women the right to an abortion even if they have been raped. Both Palin and FFL argue the standard anti-abortion line: “you can’t punish the ‘child’ for the sins of the father”. But you can punish the woman. No real woman would not sacrifice for the child of her rapist, they say. I am reminded of the words of John Paul 2 who called himself the “feminist pope” and sent a letter to the bishops of Bosnia Herzogvenia in which he urged Muslim women who had been raped by Christian soldiers to turn the rape into an “act of love” and bear their rapist’s child.
These expectations that women -- and women only -- are required to undertake supererogatory acts of extreme sacrifice has been rejected by main stream feminism and it is only its re-emergence in FFL and fundamentalist Christianity that enables women like Palin to call themselves “feminist”.
Serious feminism, developed in women’s interest rejects such romantic notions and frames women’s rights as human rights. A core tenet of feminism is the belief that women are competent moral adults or agents. They are to be trusted to make moral decisions and have both a legal and moral right to the conditions that make such decisions possible. Not the state, parents or partners or doctors can substitute their moral decisions for those of a woman. Both Sarah Palin and Feminists for Life ignore this value and want to restrict women’s moral autonomy by making abortion illegal, restricting access to contraception and to sexuality education.
They are not prepared to trust women in the one activity that they own – reproduction. In Palin’s case, a feminist for life can love guns, war, and capital punishment, but not women.
These are not new feminist ideas, they are old patriarchal ideas. Palin is not about shattering the glass ceiling (which was shattered 25 years ago by Geraldine Ferraro) but shattering women’s lives. The Palin story is fast moving - I suspect that Sarah Palin will not survive to be the Republican Party’s vice presidential nominee. The behind the scenes pressure on her to withdraw in the interest of her family’s privacy is probably intense. It would be best for women if that pressure prevails.
