Sarah Palin and Teenage Pregnancy

Bristol Palin and a friend

It is time for some "straight talk" as John McCain would perhaps suggest, about Sarah Palin and teenage pregnancy. However, the kind of "straight talk" I suggest is not what he would want us to say.

I have spent forty years working on teen pregnancy prevention. It has been my consistent cause because I know how it thwarts the development, and destroys the dreams of adolescent girls and boys. African Americans have long lived with the stigma of out of wedlock births. This misfortune had its origins in slavery where black women and men could not marry legally, thus giving rise to all of their children being born out of wedlock. Long after Hollywood starlets had children out of wedlock, black women alone lived with the stigma of having so-called "bastard" babies.

It is worth mentioning that the Hollywood starlets children have never been labeled illegitimate or bastard babies. Neither, for that matter, is Sarah Palin's future grandchild. How could it be that same racists who treated out of wedlock black children with scorn are now praising Sarah Palin's daughter? They have simply rewritten the rules for what constitutes a newborn's status, and reserved the scorn for those children whose parents are too powerless to push them back.

Neither Palin nor her daughter deserve to be praised. We can reserve our empathy for the daughter and our scorn for the Mother--a Mother who has also used her infant who has Down Syndrome.