Republican V.P. Pick’s 17 Year Old Daughter Pregnant (Again?)

The media is abuzz with the fact that the 17 year old daughter of Republican V.P. pick Sarah Palin is pregnant, and intends to marry the 18 year old father.

This follows on the heels of a report about Sarah Palin’s most recent child. Gov. Palin is 44 years old, and recently had her fifth child, who suffers from downs syndrome. Reports out of Alaska were that Palin never showed with this most recent pregnancy, nor did she announce it at the customary times. Add to this the report that Palin’s eldest daughter (the one who is pregnant now) was out of school for five months leading up to the birth with an “extended case of mono.” Questions arise, do they not?

Now, Barack Obama has emphatically stated that family members should be off limits, and I agree to an extent. They should be off limits as targets for the rival party’s political machinery. And it is really never appropriate to attack someone’s kids. But that doesn’t mean the family lives of the candidates are also off limits, particularly when the issue is what it says about the candidate themselves.

Everyone who is over 17 (and most of those who still are that age) know what a serious mistake it can be to become a mother or father at such a young age. People live with their mistakes all the time, and it certainly doesn’t make the daughter out to be some kind of bad person. She was young and careless. Now she and her family will have to live with the repercussions of that carelessness.

But there are several aspects of this that go directly Gov. Palin’s character and wisdom (or rather lack thereof). The first is this: Gov. Palin is a staunch anti-choice advocate. Her stance on choice and contraception is a big part of why she was chosen over McCain’s preferred picks, Joe Lieberman and Tom Ridge. Because Gov. Palin herself has made her stance on these issues so public, her actions bear scrutiny where the country otherwise might agree that the matter remain private.

Were Gov. Palin given the choice, she would forbid women the right to obtain an abortion, even in the extreme event where a pregnancy results from rape and even if the victim is a minor. As Richerd Cohen suggests in today's Washington Post, Gov. Palin is trumpeting her daughter's "choice" to have the baby, but would deny that "choice" to all other such similarly situated children, requiring them to have the baby no matter the cost.

Gov. Palin is also against contraception, and strongly advocates an “abstinence only” education program for our nation’s children and teens. Some would call her stance hypocritical, but I think what it really points out is that Gov. Palin’s approach to teen pregnancy is just plain wrong. It doesn’t work. Pure and simple. It is a fool’s approach, requiring equal parts wilful blindness and embittered nastiness.

If something doesn’t work, and repeatedly doesn’t work, you have to reject as a failure. To refuse to recognize the failure in your own actions, to refuse to engage in that most basic level of self-analysis or soul-searching, is a fundamental character flaw. It prevents growth, and indicates a petulant ignorance. And to advocate a failed program that you know is a failure, to seek to guarantee such failure through the legal system, is the absolute worst form of government imaginable. Is that what the nation really wants in a Vice President? I think not.