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Posted
Tuesday, February 17, 2009 4:48 PM
| By
Rachael Larimore
My reaction to Bristol Palin's interview with Greta Van Susteren falls somewhere between Hanna's "most honest and moving political interview" and Susannah's "mind-bogglingly vapid." Among the "ums" and the "likes" and the teen-speak—being a new mom is "awesome"—are a few moments of stunning honesty—telling her parents about her pregnancy was "harder than labor," for example. (Funny, to me, is that if this was a giant f-you to her mother, why she was so adamant to insist that having Tripp was her choice and not something her mother forced on her in the name of political expediency?) But mostly, she struck me as an average 18-year-old who is dealing with the pressures of unexpected motherhood. And yet so many are piling on.
Meanwhile, elsewhere on the Web, we’re either supposed to
celebrate or sympathize with, I’m still not sure, Lauren B., who has an essay
on Nerve.com about the crimp that her abortion put on her relationships with
men. Her story starts with her telling a man on their second date—and third
drink that evening—that she’d had an abortion the month before. She told the
first guy she dated seriously post-abortion about it on New Year’s Day because
she was “too out-of-control wasted” (and later complained that he insisted on
using condoms even though she was on the pill). Mixed in are the account of a
friend who got pregnant after a night of heavy drinking, and insults directed
toward abortion protesters and “teenagers in Utah practicing the pray-to-God-and-please-come-on-my-ass
method.” All this from a woman in her mid-20s who really, it turns out, just
wanted someone to be able to laugh with her about her abortion. Is this really
how the pro-choice movement presents itself? I feel about as sorry for her as I
did for Amy Richards, who gained notoriety for a New York Times Magazine essay
about how she’d aborted two of her three fetuses when pregnant with triplets
because otherwise “I'm going to have to move to Staten
Island. … I'll have to start shopping only at Costco and buying
big jars of mayonnaise.”
Maybe Bristol Palin shouldn't be a poster child for teenage
pregnancy. But she's doing more for the pro-life argument than a bunch of
narcissistic twentysomethings who get abortions because they're drunk and
forgot their birth control are doing for the pro-choice side.
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