At the minimum it shows that McCain’s choice of a running mate was guided by last minute political opportunism, rather than any serious vetting process.

“male headship” ?????  WTF?  The stupid, it BURNZ!!!

I don’t think this will be a negative for the McCain camp.  I know more than a few people earning six-figure incomes who are ‘warning’ each other about Obama being a ‘secret Muslim;’ I don’t honestly think they’re disposed to being relatively rational enough to give a shit about a seventeen-year-old, middle-class white girl being knocked up (especially if she’s planning on marrying).

With an assist from the corporate media, the Bristol Palin pregnancy issue will shrivel and die rather quickly.  Most of the GOP base will probably rationalize that it’s not like Bristol is one of those free-loading negro Tribbles who spring from the womb having babies at taxpayer expense.  Anyway, we all know that wingnuts tolerate sexual and domestic hypocrisy (and other sins) in their leaders as long as those leaders do what is expected against the various bugbears of the right.

I think this will be a huge negative for McCain.  For one, their using pro-choice words to describe the daughter’s decision.  For another, teen pregnancy is still looked down upon by a lot of people.  Sure, a lot of people with sympathize with the Palins, but look at what happened with Jamie Lynn Spears.  She’s not really considered a heroine despite the fact that she gave birth to her child.  Plus, it just feeds into the narrative that McCain didn’t really think this pick through thoroughly.

I think Sarah Palin’s main appeal was her life story.  They were positioning her as a woman who had it all.  She had 5 children, a special needs child, and she could still be governor of Alaska.  She’s superwoman!  The pregnancy of her teenage daughter, marriage or not, pokes a hole in this narrative.

I disagree completely. This will have precisely zero negative political repercussions for the McCain/Palin ticket. Remember Cheney’s gay daughter?

“There are many moments we could point to in history, beginning with Eve’s emancipation by eating the forbidden fruit”

What a bunch of dopes!  According to the Bible, Eve was the first woman - so basically there was no time when women lived in proper subservience.

But I still think this entire situation is a grade A disaster for the McCain campaign.  Only the crazy rabid base is going to see this in the plus column.  The rest of the nation tends to view teenage pregnancy in a very negative light.  Very negative. 

Posted by Amanda Marcotte on 05:47 PM
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

As they should!

Teen motherhood is virtually always a disaster.  Here are some stats.  (WARNING:  Paragraphs 4,5, and 6 made my eyes roll painfully back in my skull); 

Babies of teen mothers have 21% higher probability of low birth weight, increasing possibilities for infant death, blindness, deafness, chronic respiratory problems, mental retardation, mental illness, and cerebral palsy. It doubles chances for dyslexia, hyperactivity, and other disabilities.1

Teen mothers are often victims of abuse. As Kathleen Sylvester, vice president for domestic policy of the Progressive Policy Institute, wrote: “Some studies show… as many as two-thirds were victims of rape or sexual abuse at an early age – crimes often committed by males living in the same household. ... They are easy prey for older men: young…victims of early sexual abuse often develop emotional patterns that make them vulnerable to the attentions of older men.”2 A 1995 Guttmacher Institute study suggests that almost two-thirds of the fathers of the babies are 20 or older.

The younger the girl, the more likely sex was forced. Four in 10 girls whose first intercourse was at 13 to 14 report sex was unwanted.1

Teen mothers start parenthood with few viable economic skills. Forty-one percent of mothers under 18 finish high school, compared to 61% of 20- to 21-year-old first mothers. A scant 1.5% of teen mothers earn a college degree by age 30.1

Making matters worse, in the past 25 years, the median income for college graduates increased 13%, while the median income for high school dropouts decreased 30%.1

Frighteningly, babies of high school dropouts have an eight times higher risk of being killed than those of college graduates.3

Teen mothers are mostly single parents. Eighty percent of fathers do not marry mothers and pay less than $800 annually in child support, important income for poor children.

Children living apart from fathers are five times more likely to be poor than children from two-parent homes. Children of uninvolved fathers are twice as likely to drop out of school, abuse alcohol or drugs or go to jail, and four times more likely to need help for emotional or behavioral problems.1

So, if teen mothers have no functional family of origin, no “village” to rely on, all parenting responsibilities fall on young girls who received little nurturing themselves. It’s no surprise they turn to welfare. One-half of all teen mothers and more than three-quarters of unmarried teen mothers receive welfare within five years of their first child’s birth.1

While on paper, married, two-parent families sound like stabilizing alternatives, chances of marital success are slim. Only 30% of married teen mothers stay married. Teen marriages are twice as likely to fail as marriages in which the woman is at least 25 years old.1 Plus, studies of welfare mothers suggest some teen moms may be better off unmarried for safety reasons. According to Esta Soler, president of the Family Violence Prevention Fund, “Studies consistently show that at least 50% to 60% of women receiving welfare have experienced physical abuse by an intimate partner…compared to 22% of the general population… A significant number of women receiving welfare also report a history of physical and sexual abuse in childhood.” In a California study, some recipients report lifetime abuse rates of 80% to 83%.4

While the absence of a caring father has profound consequences for children, the presence of an abusive one may be a matter of life or death. All of these factors take a toll on children. Teen parents are twice as likely as older parents to abuse or neglect their children.5 In reported incidents of abuse and neglect, 100 per 1,000 were families headed by teen mothers. The rate is less than half in families with new mothers in their 20s: 51 incidents per 1,000 families.1 Foster care placement is also significantly higher for children of teen mothers.1

Children of teenagers, then, come to school with baggage and consequently perform poorly. They are 50% more likely to repeat a grade, do worse on standardized tests, and are less likely to complete high school than if their mothers had delayed childbearing. Sons of teen mothers are 13% more likely to end up in prison; daughters, 22% more likely to also become teen mothers.1

Luckily, the Obama camp didn’t fall for the trick and smartly distanced themselves from the whole drama.

It seems as if the Obama camp is waiting this out and letting it speak for itself so far. I have seen very few “action emails” lately (although that’s partly due to the holiday). Given that news on Palin just keeps coming, that’s probably a smart move.

It seems as if the Obama camp is waiting this out and letting it speak for itself so far. I have seen very few “action emails” lately (although that’s partly due to the holiday). Given that news on Palin just keeps coming, that’s probably a smart move.

So far, the only e-mail I’ve gotten from Obama was asking me to donate to the Red Cross for victims of Gustav.  Which is exactly what they should be doing right now.

<i>...beginning with Eve’s emancipation by eating the forbidden fruit,<>

So there was suffrage in the garden of Eden? Pesky feminists are everywhere.

What most non-politically focused people don’t realize about so-called pro-lifers and their social oppression agenda is that they want to re-impose anachronistic cultural requirements that long ago became counterproductive because macroeconomic decisions at the highest levels of governments and international financial institutions (mainly U.S.-controlled) were made that fairly quickly fundamentally shifted the burden of income generation to two people per household.

So, Phyllis, Randall, Jimmy, and Sarah, your pseudo-sacred cow has long since escaped the freaking barn!

In fact, all the cows are out of all the barns and are in the fields with the bulls, which results in sex, lots and lots of sex (sorry about the questionable metaphor), and the pro-oppression scolds and fingerwaggers (THEY ARE NOT PRO-LIFE) will never be able to do anything about it, at least not for long, and never very effectively.  Freedom comes a’calling every generation, and very few souls are willing to let it wisp away without them in tow.  This is true now and true ad infinitum.

If Roe v. Wade is ever effectively overturned, then a new Prohibition is ushered in, and prohibition always has the near-opposite effect intended.  It will cause much scolding and fingerwagging, and even some very sad human repercussions medically and also in the criminal justice system, but, in the end, things will go back to where they’ve been since the 1970s, with safe and legal abortion, because that’s where they need to be and will always need to be.  Roe v Wade didn’t come from nowhere and for no reason.

The extremists driving the slow-boil agenda to overturn Roe are the WTCU reincarnate and the old-tyme Neighborhood Witch Watch, stupid and short-sighted (and cruel) as they ever were, busybodies trying to impose their individual ways of looking at the world on everyone else.  They are absolutists but not absolutely, as is proven time after time.  The quickest way for the scold to go cold and the fingerwagger to retract their offensive digit is for their daughters to get pregnant.  Still, they are completely divisive and only divisive, with nothing productive to ever come of their activities.

You know, some countries have wisened up and criminalize the actions of these kinds of people, the totalitarians trying to oppress everyone else, similar to the anti-racketeering prosecutions against the bully pulpiteers at the doorways to Planned Parenthood offices, for example.  The modern German laws against Neo-Nazism and the expressions thereof are one example.  If not for those laws, German neo-Nazism would already have become ascendant again across the whole country one way or another.

What will it take for the U.S., with its head bobbing in and out of dark and paranoid medieval times and its genitals in the Roaring 20s, to learn this?

The saddest aspect of all this is it is not hard to speculate that poor Bristol was heavily encouraged/coerced to marry the kid who knocked her up.  Shotgun marriages are sad affairs.

Cat Ion, I agree completely.  It’s one thing to convince your 17-year old daughter to have a baby.  Another to make her keep it instead of putting the child up for adoption.  And then a whole other level of wrong to make the two poor teenage kids get married, too.

Two questions: (a) Did Palin know this before she announced for VP?; and (b) exactly how did they convince the boy to marry her daughter?

I have no idea what went on in the Palin house that led to the choice of Bristol Palin to keep her baby

Probably the same thing that “went on” in the house when the family decided not to wear large brass nose-rings or chop off their fingers with meat cleavers.  I mean, I guess they could do those things, but they just wouldn’t occur to anybody.  Not everyone views a pregnancy as an opportunity to weigh the relative benefits of childbirth versus abortion.

Amanda:

Bye, sicko.

About time. That guy is a complete sociopath.