My Way Or The Highway, by Sarah Palin

You know what happens when you take away a woman's right to to have a baby or not? You get Sarah Palin.

Her life has been filled with unplanned, and arguably, unwanted pregnancies. And she wants you to have them too.

Let's start with her first one. The one she used to get Todd Palin to marry her.

Relying heavily on her fundamentalist Christian beliefs about contraception and abortion, but choosing to ignore it's warnings about fornication and promiscuity, I believe the enterprising Sarah accidentally got pregnant on purpose to manipulate Todd into matrimony.

Think about it. After all, this was in 1988 not 1958. Forcing a man into marriage with a pregnancy is a vestige of passive aggressive female behavior from a time when unmarried, pregnant women were shamed by society and often abandoned with no other legal way out. Fortunately, for men as well as women, pregnancy used as a tool for blackmail has been made virtually obsolete by easy access to a plethora of contraceptives and Roe v. Wade.

However, in 1988 Sarah was already 24. Old by sled dog standards. She and Todd had been dating since high school. And she was probably tired of waiting for him to step up to the plate.

If this had been the fifties instead of the eighties, they most likely would have been married already, since that was the usual trade off for a horny guy who wanted sex from his girlfriend.  However, unlike the fifties, Todd was no doubt enjoying a major perk of the women's movement that men have embraced with unabashed enthusiasm -- sex without responsibility. Marriage? I got my sex. I don't need no stinkin' marriage!

Meanwhile, Miss Sarah had a plan. As an Alaskan outdoorsman, I doubt that Todd worried about contraception. By all indications Sarah Barracuda is the type of woman who would not relinquish that responsibility to a guy anyway. To feign the appearance of an unplanned pregnancy, women on the pill might skip a few pills. Other women might poke holes in their diaphragms. Count the days wrong. Whatever. Regardless, Sarah obviously knew she was pregnant very early, well within the first few weeks. She had a safe, legal choice for ending the pregnancy. But her religion, which she apparently ignores when it suits her, took any decision to end the pregnancy off the table. Fortunately, having no choice but marriage suited Sarah's purposes.

So they eloped. and an accidental baby was born less than eight months later.

If the first pregnancy was unplanned, but useful, her most recent pregnancy was evidently unwanted.  

After forty, the chance of a Down Syndrome baby increases to 50%. At 13 weeks, 43 year old Sarah learned her fetus had Down Syndrome. I think it would be safe to say that she didn't think it would happen to her, not with four healthy children. From all accounts Sarah was very conflicted by the news. She has said her inner turmoil drove her to hide her pregnancy as long as possible. She was in denial. Obviously, she couldn't process having a Down Syndrome child. To avoid talking about it, she didn't tell the press or her staff that she was pregnant. She didn't even tell her own children about its handicap until the baby was born.

Imagine what it's like to know you have a physically and mentally impaired fetus early in pregnancy and you have no choice but to carry it to term. Sarah Palin let her religion dictate that decision. Fortunately, her religion cannot and should not dictate the law of the land, so I could have and would have chosen an abortion.

Perhaps, until its birth, she was hoping that, by some miracle, she would lose the baby naturally. The best evidence of this is that she flew to Texas to make a speech at the end of her third trimester, against airline regulations and traditional medical advice. She flew again after the speech, when she was leaking amniotic fluid, which could have caused the death of her baby. Again this is the kind of passive aggressive behavior that women practice when put in the untenable position of not having a choice.

The first baby was unplanned. The second was unwanted. The third was her daughter's, both unplanned and unwanted.  

Barack Obama, in his convention speech, said that we may not agree on abortion, but we can agree that there are too many unwanted teen pregnancies.

Despite her history of unplanned and unwanted pregnancies, Sarah Palin said in her interview with Charlie Gibson that there are too many abortions. I guess it's easier for Sarah to ban abortions than teach sex education. By the way, Sarah, there are far more unwanted pregnancies than unwanted abortions.

Alaska's favorite GILF says she would only approve of abortion to save the life of the mother. At what point do you step in to save the life of a teenage mother? When her knowledge of sex is limited to an abstinence only education and she's trying to hold off a testosterone poisoned boyfriend? When she gets pregnant anyway and has to leave school and get a job? When the baby is born and she has to find work as a single parent without having a high school diploma? When she spends the rest of her life raising a child alone and struggling to make ends meet? An abortion can save a teen mother and an innocent child from a depressing, empty life of low self esteem, low wages, and low expectations.

But Sarah's answer to an unplanned, unwanted teen pregnancy isn't abortion; it isn't even adoption; it's marriage. Instead of saving the life of her daughter so she can grow up and realize her potential, finish her education, and become a productive member of society, her mother would ask her daughter to have a baby when she's only eighteen and marry the reluctant father of the child, a high school jock who has already stated publicly that he doesn't want kids.

Three unwanted pregnancies. Two guys roped into marriage, One handicapped infant.

Sarah Palin would argue that she had no other choice.

That's why she's no choice of mine.