FREE BRISTOL PALIN

Friends, I have a serious, topical question today. We will be returning to disco balls immediately . . . trust me. I have one on my desk right now, locked and loaded and ready to go.

But let’s just talk for one second, okay? Because I am worried about you guys. And I want to try to answer the question . . . why are people talking about Bristol Palin?

Brisol Palin, for those of you who have managed to avoid all forms of media for the last 48 hours, is the daughter of Republican Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin. Bristol is seventeen years old and five months pregnant, and she has the extreme misfortune to be in the middle of a contentious presidential race.

This makes me so queasy, I find it hard to type.

A lot of people are saying, “Isn’t that wonderful! What a nice family to support her!” I’d bet my Abba collection that most of you saying that are probably pretty nice people, who do a lot to support others. But I respectfully disagree. I think this situation is nuts. I don't think she's getting support at all, and this is one of the most messed up messages I have ever seen put across.

Let’s leave the issue of abortion well, well aside. I happen to be pro-choice, but if you are not, I respect you for that. That’s not an issue I want to approach, because that’s something that everyone holds personally dear, one way or another. Let’s just talk about teen pregnancy in general.

The simple, plain old fact is . . . you really don’t have to get pregnant. No, REALLY. We have had the technology for MANY, MANY DECADES now to prevent pregnancy. It is not expensive. It is not hard to get. It is not hard to use. It comes in many forms. And some of it protects you from disease. Hooray! In the U.S., you can go into any drugstore and buy birth control. It’ll set you back maybe $5. That’s, like, a cheeseburger.

But okay . . . you’re embarrassed. You didn’t plan this. It just kind of came up and . . .

No, my friends. No, no. I do not want to hear it. If sex is in the picture, you need to get over this misplaced embarrassment. If you get pregnant . . . you are in for a world of exposure beyond your wildest dreams. Your body is also going to expand in nineteen different directions. Your internal organs will rearrange. You may develop conditions that restrict what you eat or do. In time, you will not be able to sit with your legs closed, and eventually you will end up on a table with your feet in stirrups and about fifteen strangers coming in and out of the room and looking at your you-know-what like they are looking at the town clock . . .

So you really should get over that “I don’t want to face the checkout person” embarrassment now.

The majority of teen pregnancies are unintended, largely because this is not 1317, and we are no longer dying of old age at forty. We have long lives now, and seventeen is not really an ideal time to settle down. For some people, there’s money and support for the new baby. But that’s actually uncommon. What about all the people whose parents would kick them to the curb if they got pregnant? (And believe me, these people exist. Lots of them. I’ve met quite a few.)

But okay. Say your parents don’t kick you to the curb. Say you are greeted by loving arms. But what if your family doesn’t have complete medical insurance? What about school? What about the fact that your time to grow up is kind of getting a line drawn under it, because now you have a mouth to feed and a human life to nurture . . . and you’ve only recently figured out how to make French toast without burning it, or how to stay awake through all of sixth period Spanish?

If you have a baby as a teenager, you’re a lot less likely to finish high school. You’re a LOT less likely to go to college. Which means you’ve just drastically increased your chances of living in poverty. Even under the very best of circumstances, you’ve just lost a lot of opportunity. And it didn’t need to happen.

And really? Don’t look to your boyfriend. It is a simple fact of biology that guys more or less get off scott-free on this count. There may be social repercussions for them, or there may not be. They may experience guilt, or they may not. But the bottom line is . . . they won’t experience a belly full of baby. This is all you.

As if that wasn’t bad enough . . . let’s look at it from a cold, clinical, beancountery way.

In Alaska alone (you know why we are talking about you, Alaska) . . . teen pregnancies cost the state at least $30 million in the year 2004. AND THERE ARE NOT VERY MANY PEOPLE IN ALASKA. (And no, it is really not that helpful that Governor Palin slashed the budget for the program there for teen mothers.)

Overall, the costs to the nation ran to about $9.1 billion. Yes. $9.1 billion. Oooof. And that’s just government money. The burden of a lot of this is on families, and who even knows what that runs to. This is all for something that could have probably have been prevented by a small piece of rubber or a pill that costs pennies to make.

A lot of people say, “ABSTINENCE! IT IS THE ONLY WAY! THE ONLY THING TO TEACH! All of this fornication is a horrible modern thing brought on by television and video games and BOOKS!”

Har har har! GOOD ONE! I don’t know how these people missed hearing about all of human history . . . but this sex thing has been going on for a while now, and frankly, it’s probably going to continue. It’s the world’s oldest form of entertainment. We come pre-installed with all kinds of hormones and squishy bits. Maybe this will be improved upon when Human 2.0 is released, but this is what we have so far. And in general, it works pretty well. There is lots of fun and comedy value, and we get to continue as a species!

My bottom line is . . . sex is something we really need to deal with. Not shamefully. Not through hiding information. It’s up to every individual to decide when he or she is ready for it. And at WHATEVER age you make that decision, you should really be informed about how to manage it.

There’s this argument that comprehensive sex education is going to make kids want to have a lot of sex. Clearly these people have never sat through a comprehensive sex ed class. There is pretty much nothing in the world that is less sexy than your teacher talking about condoms, which are completely stupid looking to begin with. You have to be a very special person to sit there under the antiseptic, florescent glow of third period, your mid-morning crash setting in, staring at a plastic cross section of a uterus and think, “I have GOT to get me some of this.”

I speak as someone who was actually never in that class. I only saw them later, after I graduated. I went to a high school that taught abstinence only—in a kind of “have sex and will lock you in the basement and unchain the wolf” way. They were REALLY serious about this.

The only exception was that for ONE DAY in senior year, the health teacher was allowed one period to come in with a big black box. She had to lock the door, and then we got about a half hour crash course on everything in the entire world related to birth control. Which is pointless, because it takes you at least an hour to stop snickering. It was intentionally designed to be ineffective, because the official doctrine was that birth control was bad.

Did any of this help? Errrr . . . no. We had loads of people who got pregnant. It would have helped a lot if someone had really hammered home the statistics and said, “Girls who have sex without birth control have a 90% chance of getting pregnant within a year.”

So what was the solution in my school? I’ll tell you about something that really happened.

In my senior year, there was a very sweet, kind of innocent sophomore. After a dance one night, a guy started paying her a lot of attention. They started making out, and she ended up getting pressured into having sex. And got pregnant. In one shot.

Devastated and unable to talk to her parents out of fear, she turned to a teacher. This teacher, though incredibly kind, was obligated to tell the administration. A day later, the girl heard her name being called over the speaker to come to the office, which was always a bad, bad sign. When she walked in, the principal was on the phone, and what she heard was, “I think your daughter has something to tell you.” And she was handed the phone to talk to her parents. Then she was expelled, just like every single other student who ever got pregnant in my school and was found out. Every single one. That was the policy. For the most part, people kept it quiet. They got abortions on the downlow, and they got zero support, because they couldn’t tell anyone. That’s how it was managed. LOOK! WE HAVE NO TEEN PREGNANCIES! SEE HOW EFFECTIVE THIS IS?

I was three months away from graduation at the time. When I heard this, I turned to my mom and said, “I am leaving this school. I don’t even care anymore.”

And I think for maybe an hour, I was serious. I wanted to walk away from the place and go to some other high school for another senior year. My mom is pretty conservative, but she is also a nurse, and she is very practical about the matter of pregnancy, as nurses tend to be. She was, to my amazement, almost as outraged.

“That is NOT how you handle a pregnancy,” she said. “What goes on in this school? Don’t they teach birth control?” Because she hadn’t realized up to this point that they didn’t.

When I explained that we had no such class, her jaw dropped. “Sometimes,” she said, “I think we made a real mistake in sending you there.” This is from the woman who still claims that the stork brought me and loves to tell me how she has never smoked a cigarette or had a drink IN HER ENTIRE LIFE (and she is not joking whatsoever) and is thoroughly scandalized by anyone over forty who wears footless leggings. I mean, she has an entire drawer of SLIPS!

So I am not coming from some elite, super-progressive upbringing. I am coming from the abstinence/denial program, and it is ONE BIG HOT MESS.

Your school is probably not like that—or, at least, I really, really hope it’s not. I just want you to understand why I am so baffled and enraged by people who take tools away from girls, take away knowledge and protection. It’s Medieval and illogical and makes the world look at us like we are its insane hillbilly cousin who washes himself with a rag on a stick.

So we return to Bristol Palin, who is standing there with a spotlight the size of the moon shining on her, all of seventeen years old, with the entire Republican National Convention hanging on the fact that she has to have this baby she probably didn’t intend to ever be pregnant with and marry her boyfriend. She will now be saddled to this dude whether she wants to be or not. And she can’t have an abortion even if she wants one because the PRESIDENT WILL PROBABLY CALL AND YELL AT HER and three thousand news cameras would follow her.

Bristol Palin has no choices.

This is the very definition of suck. I feel for her. When I was seventeen and newly released from the aforementioned high school gulag, I basically acted like someone who was in full-time training for the Stupid Olympics. I woke up each new and glorious morning and asked myself, “What mischief today?” Seventeen is when you get to date ALL THE WRONG PEOPLE so you can learn important lessons. Not when you marry them because there’s an election. Not when you have babies you aren’t ready for so a political machine can roll on, right over top of you.

So why are people talking about Bristol Palin? Because it’s an election, and this is what happens. But most people are talking about the messed up system that backed her into a corner. This isn't to say that this is everyone else's fault. Mistakes were made here. I think these kinds of mistakes tend to happen a lot when girls have to fumble around in the dark, when they aren't armed with facts and realities and treated like full human beings, reproductive system and all. To hold her up as a shining example of things being done right is beyond my comprehension.

On a day to day basis, Bristol will be taken care of. The girls like her who aren’t the focus of media scrutiny . . . not so much.

And I’m saying this to you, because a lot of you are girls, and a lot of you are seventeen or younger . . . and these things will sooner or later come up in your life, if they haven’t already. There is no reason why your options should be taken away. There is no reason why you should be denied knowledge or care. And there’s no reason for you to be moms yet, not if you don’t want to be, which I imagine many of you don’t. Whether it is abstinence or contraception . . . either way, this does not have to be your fate. And you’re not dirty. And you’re not bad. You’re human, squishy bits and all.

If anyone tells you otherwise, I really, really hope you have the natural presence of mind to turn and walk away from them.

Wow. I need to shake it off. And I have just the thing. Whenever I get stressed now, I think about the subject that stresses me out, and I superimpose it over this video. Try it! Imagine that test, or dreaded conversation, or horrible deadline . . . imagine it in detail . . . and that this is the movie someone has made of you going through this problem!



It WORKS, doesn’t it?

Now, today’s winner of Suite Scarlett is . . . Summer Marie.

And I’ve decided that I have to give away one more, because there were very few shiny things in this post. I didn’t know this rant was coming on. I will post again soon, and there will be LOADS OF SHINY THINGS AND SEKRITS in it!

So, if you want to win, leave a comment! Fire away! What do YOU think about all of this? ALL OPINIONS WELCOME, as always!