It was a sight to behold: Sarah Palin, after her triumphant debut, parading her young brood on the stage of the Xcel Center, John McCain striding like grandpa among them. I admire their courage, their pluck, their blissful absence of shame.
But political families, like television characters and royalty, are not just ornaments on the shelf, put there so we can admire their shiny hair and bright smiles. They stand before us as examples of how to live. And as I watched 17-year-old Bristol, blossoming with child, tenderly hold hands with her boyfriend, Levi Johnston, I wondered how this played to America's teenagers.
Does it suddenly look cool to be pregnant?
Despite a 30 percent decline in the teen pregnancy rate over the last decade and a half, the United States still has the highest teen pregnancy rate in the industrialized world. And the numbers have begun to creep up again, says Sarah Brown, CEO of the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy. "Teen pregnancy is driven by teens having sex and not using contraception," she explains (because we seem to forget this, I guess). "There's some evidence teens are not being quite as careful as they were just a few years ago."
That's in part because teens are starting to practice less caution, says Brown. But it's also because images in the media make having a baby while you're still a baby look kinda okay. "We have a lot in the media including Jamie Lynn Spears that seem to glamorize, or normalize, getting pregnant as a girl or very young woman," Brown told MSNBC's Today Show (clip below).
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That wouldn't be so bad if the example of Bristol Palin -- and it is an example, clear and plain -- came from a party that gave any support to single mothers, including teen mothers. Or if we lived in a world where teen moms still finished high school and went on to college.
But we don't. According to a National Women's Law Center report published last year, a full third of girls who drop out of high school cite pregnancy as the reason, and nearly all of those girls say they would have stayed if they'd had the support to do so. By the age of 30, says a survey by the Gates Foundation, only a three percent of women who became mothers as teenagers have earned a college degree.
It's not surprising, then, that teen moms draw more from public assistance coffers than do mothers who delayed childbearing at least into their 20s.
And those coffers are emptying out. The Palins might say that families should take up the burden of supporting teen moms. But we haven't all been blessed with happy, harmonious families like the Palins, and only a very small percentage of adolescent moms get support from their babies' young fathers. Underage girls who have babies frequently need help to feed and shelter their families. And what has John McCain, or the Republican Party -- or the Democrats, for that matter -- done to make sure they get it?
Almost nothing. The news as circulated by now that Sarah Palin used her line-item veto power to decrease funding to a teen mom program in Alaska, but the picture is bigger than that. Policy-making on behalf of single mothers has been systematically cruel and moralistic, blaming single moms for their pregnancies and then requiring them to work full-time to support them -- never mind that education that might eventually raise their incomes and lift them out of poverty. Get to the mill on time, or starve.
And the right-wing rhetoric about single mothers -- clouds of it are available on the Web, collected over the decade -- has been singularly incriminating. Mitt Romney, when he quit the presidential race, gave a speech blaming unwed motherhood on pornography (at least I think that's what he said):
The attack on faith and religion is . . . relentless. And tolerance for pornography—even celebration of it—and sexual promiscuity, combined with the twisted incentives of government welfare programs have led to today’s grim realities: 68% of African American children are born out-of-wedlock, 45% of Hispanic children, and 25% of White children.
Nice.
This year, John McCain's health care proposal will do exactly nothing for uninsured mothers and their families, which we can assume a number of teen moms are. No speech from Palin can make the Republicans' platform pro-life, in the truest sense of the word.
Does anyone remember how Dan Quayle lashed out at Murphy Brown in 1992, claiming the television character was glorifying single motherhood? That was the discussion that precipitated this simplistic debate over "welfare queens" and irresponsible single mothers. And maybe the presence of Bristol Palin on our national stage will have the opposite effect: Maybe, if we're lucky, it will take us the other way, into a society where "pro-life" means not just opposing abortion, but willing to support single mothers and their children with equal access to health care, food and shelter, and education. Including sex education.
And that, of course, would entail electing Barack Obama.
(Cross-posted at my blog, Little Green Animals.)