Sarah Palin, the Republican party's proposed nominee for US vice-president, has announced that Bristol, her unmarried 17-year-old daughter, is pregnant. Sarah Palin is regarded as having a strong and total committment to the sanctity of human life and the dignity of the family. Some anti-life commentators have been quick to rush to condemnation. Sarah Sand, an American columnist, has written:"I have utter contempt for [Bristol's] mother [Sarah] ... Bristol is one year away from legally being an adult, and unfortunately for her she’s fair game ... Bristol has absolutely no choice about having a baby ... But this isn’t about Bristol. It’s about her mother, her mother’s parenting skills, judgment ... Palin is one-hundred percent responsible for putting her nearly adult daughter in the limelight and is to be condemned for it, not us who will talk about it..."
For the anti-life/anti-family lobby, sexual activity is primarily about personal pleasure, and the natural consequence of sex - a child - is such an intolerable imposition that it justifies even homicide. As Ann Furedi (a recent recipient of my George Orwell Prize) of BPAS has written:
"Sex is an accepted part of an adult relationship for which we do not expect to suffer unwanted consequences. Pregnancy is seen by an increasing number of women as an unwanted consequence that they are not prepared to adapt to ... [I]t may be time to understand that, for women, abortion is an essential method of family planning and accept it as such."
I blogged recently about how The Times has been openly promoting abortion as a good solution for teenage pregnancy.
One suspects that the controversy about Bristol Palin's pregnancy is being whipped up by the anti-life lobby via their friends in the media. They believe that having an abortion is the right thing for a teenage mother to do and they don’t want Sarah Palin and her family setting a very different example to the world – including their joyful acceptance of Trig, their Down’s Syndrome son.
I hope that reasonable-minded citizens will continue to rally around the Palin family.
