This was hard to believe. I had to check twice to make sure it was really Time magazine and not some clever decoy, you know, like “crisis pregnancy” centers like to pull when they set up facilities next to a Planned Parenthood clinic and call themselves something like “The Planning for Parenthood Center” to fake legitimacy and trick people who are looking for actual reproductive health care into their clutches. But no, it is Time magazine, and the guy who is writing the article is named Nathan Thornburgh. Actually, I was so underwhelmed by this article that I decided to do a quick search on this guy’s name to see what else he might’ve written out there, and apparently, this is but a second of a series of articles he has produced about visiting Alaska in the light of the Palin veep announcement. The other one, entitled “Where Palin Made Her Name,” opens with the following gem:
It’s Friday night, and there have got to be 500 people packed into the Sluice Box, a beer-soaked clapboard honky-tonk at the Alaska State Fair – the state’s biggest event all year – just down the highway from Governor Sarah Palin’s hometown of Wasilla. The legendary Hobo Jim, Alaska’s official state balladeer, the guy who has opened sessions of the legislature with a song, is onstage, working blue.
“Here’s to the girl from the great Northwest,” he sings, “with tits as hard as a hornet’s nest.” The crowd whistles its approval.
For the record, he’s not singing about Palin, though the curvature and comeliness of McCain’s surprise vice-presidential nominee pick are brought up by just about everyone here, man and woman, in a way that would make lower-48 liberals and feminists cringe.
Mmm…you know, there are certain things that people who don’t like a certain other set of people say that are red flags cluing one in on the fact that that person, indeed, does not like them. The above is a great example of that. It’s interesting that some journalists appear to believe that the spirit of the supposed ideal of journalistic neutrality is fulfilled by passive-aggression–frankly, I’d prefer that they just openly said fuck the whole ideal! and engaged in outright aggression. It’d leave less of a greasy aftertaste.
At any rate, it’s a strange article. He begins by stating that he thinks that Sarah Palin’s underaged daughter’s pregnancy is nobody’s business but her and her family’s, which makes the fact that he’s writing an article about said pregnancy in a nationally popular magazine rather odd. Would he like us better if we quit reading his article right then in solidarity? He then goes on to describe how they’re all real men in Alaska–hunting is apparently not something they do in any of those other 48 states, you know, the ones occupied by liberals and feminists, and Alaska also has people who’ve lost family members to industrial accidents and that go serve in Iraq, which again sets them quite apart from the 48 Contiguous Pussy States where that shit apparently hardly ever even comes up. The naturally flowing conclusion that he draws from all this is so that really, it is SO not a big deal to be an underaged mother. (You can almost hear him shout Isn’t this REFRESHING, readers??)
Yep, it gets even more unreal than that–don’t believe me? Here ya go:
The fact is, regardless of what you will hear over the next few days, Bristol [Palin]‘s pregnancy is not a legitimate political issue. Sarah Palin is a longterm member of a group called Feminists for Life, which is not opposed to birth control. So you probably can’t tag her for consigning young people to unwanted pregnancies.
Oh, my. You most certainly can, including that of her own daughter, unless you’re trying to stretch reality even further and claim that Bristol Palin is having a planned pregnancy. Let’s see, for instance, what Feminists for Life actually does have to say about contraception:
What is Feminists for Life’s position on contraception?
Feminists for Life’s mission is to address the unmet needs of women who are pregnant or parenting. Preconception issues including abstinence and contraception are outside of our mission.
Erm, but they DO have a stated position on, for instance, assisted suicide, which seems to be a leetle further afield from the topic of pregnancy than contraception is…come on, what’s the REAL reason—?
Some FFL members and supporters support the use of non-abortifacient contraception while others oppose contraception for a variety of reasons
Translated: not all of us have multiple kids, making indelicate questions about our contraceptive status unavoidable if we were to outright oppose it.
FFL is concerned that certain forms of contraception have had adverse health effects on women.
Translated: But if we can find a health link, no matter how dubious, we’re primed and ready to jump on that bandwagon at the slightest moment’s notice!!
But how about Sarah Palin herself?
Q. Will you support the right of parents to opt out their children from curricula, books, classes, or surveys, which parents consider privacy-invading or offensive to their religion or conscience?
Sarah Palin: Yes. Parents should have the ultimate control over what their children are taught.
Q. Will you support funding for abstinence-until-marriage education instead of for explicit sex-education programs, school-based clinics, and the distribution of contraceptives in schools?
Sarah Palin: Yes, the explicit sex-ed programs will not find my support.
You know, sometimes it is useful to actually get to see, so CLEARLY illustrated, where the fervent support of the above positions lands the daughters of those who practice said preachery. No theories or opinions here, folks! Real-life consequences of real-life philosophies.
And after all this, here is the conclusion that Nathan Thornburgh says he’s come to:
As for the idea — sure to be floated—that the avowedly anti-abortion Palin may have pressured her poor daughter to ruin her life by carrying an unwanted baby to term, I wouldn’t bet on it.
Is my favorite part of the above sentence the pooh-poohing of the idea that having a baby at age 17 might be quite life-altering in a negative way or that any girl forced to do so is a sarcastically pooor weeeetle thaaaaang, or is it that he thinks that it’s even possible that Bristol Palin was presented with all her choices in a rational and unbiased fashion?
(sigh) I’ll let you know when I figure that out…
Having now read Thornburgh’s article, I can say that you came up with the best title for this post EVER. My god, what a turd.
I don’t know why you’re shocked this attitude is coming from Time. I gave it up as a vomit-inducing tool of the Partiarchy after they published that sickening paen to Purity Balls, but they’ve been sliding downhill for years.
I think I am a little on the naive side sometimes about MSM.
I feel incomplete, like a kid without a pony. I wanna pregnant teen too! Wait a minute, I remember Rush Limbaugh and his crowd always saying how that was one of the definitions of what is wrong with America, inner city, unmarried, teenage mothers…Oh I get it… Teen mothers are ok if you live in Alaska.
So I need to move to Alaska, then I can have my own little pregnant teen. Then I can give her a name like Trig, or Calc, or Geo. Oh wait, I forgot about the border tensions with Russia and Canada that the wonderful foreign policy expert Gov. Palin has had to moderate. That sounds scary. I guess I will stay in the lower 48 and wish I had a pony.
Gee Synikal, don’t you know that things that are bad in cities, and that represent the demise of civilization as we know it and the American Way are just fine in remote areas, where they demonstrate rugged individualism, a refusal to defer to irrelevant bougie conformity, and the American Way.
See also: gun ownership, (some) drugs, dropping out of high school, and having cars on blocks in front of your house.
Hmmm, several points in here:
1) Ironic that the term “‘reproductive’ health care” is used so often in reference to practices that explicitly seek to prevent reproduction. Why such terminology?
2) Note that Feminists for Life do not take a position on artificial contraception; our blogger, Ms. Kansas, reads implications that simply are not there
3) Strange also that we want any and all birth control methods taught in schools and expect pro-abstinence parents to teach abstinence at home. Since abstinence is the most effective method (when actually used) to prevent pregnancy and infection, not to mention uniformly accepted as ethical, why don’t we teach this common-denominator method in schools and expect parents to teach other methods at home? Note that abstinence is the only method whose failure rate includes (indeed, is exclusively made up of) the times the method isn’t used. What would condoms’ failure rate look like, if we include all the times condoms were not used by those willing to use them? Certainly worse than the numbers published now.
This idea that children are so secondary as to be reversible in the womb is why Europe is withering and portions of Blue America (especially the Northeast) are stalling in population (and, thus, political representation). The more liberal portions of the political spectrum would do well to reconsider this issue – after all, only one side of the debate is eliminating its own future supporters.
Bryan Kirchoff
St. Louis
Feed the troll…don’t feed the troll…feed the troll…don’t feed the troll…decisions decisions…
Okay, I’ll bite.
1) It’s only ironic if you think that “reproductive health care” is defined as “health care only for women who are reproducing.” That has its own name; it’s called “maternal health care.” “Reproductive health care” refers to all health care practices and procedures specifically targeting the human reproductive organs. Hopefully that clears that up for you.
2) Feminists for Life takes exactly the position that I quoted them taking above; it’s from their website, and I didn’t assign them any position on “artificial contraception.” I don’t even use that phrase anywhere in the blog post. Are you sure you’re actually commenting on this particular blog post..?
3) We don’t expect parents, pro-abstinence or otherwise, to teach anything in particular at home. Whether they do or not is of course their choice. Comprehensive sex ed programs do teach that perfectly practiced abstinence is the most effective method of pregnancy prevention, and they also teach that if you don’t use a condom, it completely fails as a pregnancy prevention tool for that sexual episode. The problems you’re raising do not exist.
I would much prefer the life I am most likely to have, statistically speaking, in Europe or the United States, rather than the life I would most likely statistically have in countries where the birth rate is much higher, such as the countries of Africa and South America. But of course, if you prefer the kind of life the average person has in those countries, you can continue to push for us to emulate them. I am untroubled by the “liberals underbreeding so their support will die out in the future!” argument–if political philosophies were passed down from generation to generation strictly by breeding genetics, then we would never have had a democracy at all–we would have no system of government whatsoever, as no new ideas could be had and adopted by any majority of the population at any time point whatsoever. Perhaps random mutations would, over hundreds or thousands of generations, spread enough through the population that a new idea might be uniformly adopted some centuries later–and of course you’d have the occasional lone sport–but that would be all. Given the large changes in government over the past two thousand years in Euro-American culture alone, clearly differing philosophies are not based upon genetic heritage, but upon the generation and adoption of new ideas by each generation of thinking adults.
Well, it certainly took the newest wave of PABloggers long enough to return Punkassblog to its glorious position as Pandagon Troll Training Ground.
And Bryan, I’m going to have to label you as such because you’re a one-trick pony who has not failed to mention abortion in any comment, including and especially threads that are not about abortion. Please enjoy our lax banning policy and the generally low comment density that will allow bloggers and regular commenters the luxury of playing with you.
Sure, but if abstinence, in typical use, is not used more than condoms are not used ^ fail, it may still be less effective. Indeed, the typical use effectiveness of abstinence is highly suspect:
Since we’re talking about education here, though, what we should actually be studying is the effectiveness of abstinence-only education. On which, sadly, there is quite little data. Smaller studies have shown that abstinence-only interventions fare worse, in the long term, than similar interventions emphasizing safe sex (including condom use), but it’s not completely clear that those results scale up.
If only there were some way to find out.
(Condoms have a typical-use failure rate of 10-15%.)