Blogs Comment On Palin VP Nomination; Palin’s Daughter’s Pregnancy;

[Joanne98]

The following is a summary of selected women’s health-related blog entries.

~ “The Palin Paradox: Does Her Candidacy Mark the Death of the Christian Right?” Paul Abrams, Huffington Post: As of a result of Christian conservatives’ embrace of the pregnancy of Bristol Palin, the 17-year-old daughter of Republican vice presidential nominee Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, its members no longer can “rail against big-town, or Hollywood, or Washington, D.C, or New York or San Francisco ‘values’ as the cause of people’s ‘misbehavior’ and social disintegration,” Abrams writes. Abrams questions whether conservatives still have any “currency” to “rail against sex education in the schools as the cause of promiscuity” or to say that vaccinating teenage girls against the human papillomavirus to prevent cervical cancer and genital warts leads to “promiscuity.” He adds, “By being forced by circumstance to embrace Sarah Palin, the Christian right is acknowledging that ‘legitimate’ families are not just the ‘mom&dad&buddy&sis’ of the 1950s, but have morphed into a variety of shapes and forms that all need to be supported and accommodated” (Abrams, Huffington Post, 9/5).

~ “There’s More to HPV Prevention Than Gardasil,” Emily Alexander, RH Reality Check: Recent media coverage of Merck’s HPV vaccine Gardasil has “spiked” and includes articles that “have distorted recent reports of adverse events, or side effects, to foment fear about safety and perpetuate the spread of misinformation” about the vaccine, according to Alexander. She writes that it is a “good time” for advocates of women’s health to “reflect on what has happened over the past two years what remains unknown about the vaccine, and to reaffirm” their commitment to providing advocacy and the “highest quality education” about cervical cancer prevention and HPV. Although the “complex questions raised by HPV vaccines” cannot be “ignore,” advocates can “mobilize around our common principles and work together to achieve our ultimate goals of improving access to health care and increasing information to empower women,” Alexander writes (Alexander, “RH Reality Check,” 9/5).

~ “Have We Won the Rhetorical Issue on Choice?” David Cohen, Feminist Law Professors: The statement by Sarah Palin that she and her husband, Todd, are “proud” of their pregnant daughter Bristol’s “decision to have her baby,” as well as Republican presidential nominee Sen. John McCain’s (Ariz.) 2000 comment that if his daughter were to become pregnant it would be a “family decision,” indicates that “choice would be made by the people involved,” Cohen writes in a blog post. According to Cohen, the statements by McCain and Palin, both of whom oppose abortion rights, “indicate that there is a decision to be made” about whether to carry a pregnancy to term, adding, “There’s no more accurate statement of the pro-choice position than that.” Cohen writes that abortion-rights advocates have “either won the rhetorical issue, or there really never has been a debate in the first place, at least on the personal level. Rather, anti-choice individuals are quick to condemn others for making a choice they don’t like, but when their own family (or they themselves) are faced with an unwanted pregnancy, most people, including those who label themselves anti-choice, think of it as a choice what to do next” (Cohen, Feminist Law Professors, 9/3).

~ “The Elephant in the Room,” Dana Goldstein, American Prospect: Among conservatives, the announcement that Bristol Palin is pregnant “is more than just fine — politically, it is playing like a dream among Republican delegates” at the convention in St. Paul., Minn. — Goldstein writes. She adds that “self-described family-values conservatives say they are even more thrilled with Sarah Palin since they learned her daughter is pregnant, marrying and will keep the child. They are convinced that not only is the Alaska governor a paragon of the pro-life movement, unafraid to live out her values in the public eye, but that she is the very epitome of conservative professional motherhood, a woman who pursued her career without limiting her family size, teaching her offspring about the sacredness of pregnancy along the way” (Goldstein, American Prospect, 9/3).

~ “Sex Education as Liberation,” Courtney Martin, American Prospect: Martin, a writer and teacher in Brooklyn, discusses whether the two sides of the sex education debate — abstinence-only and comprehensive — are “myopic” and it is “time to take a new approach to the conversation.” According to Martin, “We’ve debated ourselves into a tizzy, framing sexual activity as the shared — whether preventable or inevitable — evil, throwing poison darts of statistics and dogma back and forth. In the process, we’ve lost sight of the target all together: Education is supposed to promote self-aware, healthy, whole human beings” (Martin, American Prospect, 9/2).

~ “Sarah Palin, Right and Wrong,” Hilary Rosen, CNN.com: “There is a really strong case to be made against the McCain/Palin ticket,” and it does not have to do with how the candidates “take care of their families” but how “their policy choices affect” millions of U.S. families, Rosen, political director of the Huffington Post, writes. According to Rosen, McCain and Palin “want us to leave their families alone,” yet “they want to make rules for our families by eliminating our right to make our own choices over abortion, eliminate our access to family planning education or domestic partner benefits, and our freedom from discrimination. They want to control what our kids learn in school about sex and science. In short, through the policies they promote and the judges they support, they want government to have more control over our private lives than at any time in history.” Rosen writes that the “right reason” to oppose McCain and Palin is “not the process or the people, it’s what they represent” (Rosen, CNN.com, 9/4).

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