The Birds and the Bees at the RNC


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Published: Sep 10, 2008

After three days that contained enough absurdist theater to qualify for the Fringe Festival, the image I'm left with from the Republican National Convention is of the future Mrs. Levi Johnston — you know her better as Bristol Palin — standing onstage with her family and the McCains, being showered with the kind of wild-eyed applause usually reserved for that other rock star in the presidential race.

There she was, all of 17, having sprouted a baby bump and a sketchy-looking fiancé since arriving in Minneapolis, and feeling the love from an arena — and a nation — full of Republicans who drenched Jamie Lynn Spears with scorn when she got herself in the family way. To them, Bristol was a hero, and her pregnancy a "blessed event" rather than an unfortunate episode in some tacky political telenovela.

The whole thing gave me a weird flashback to when I was 15, standing on a church altar and holding my best friend's baby — Laura had a son at 16, and a daughter at 19 — while he was baptized. I certainly don't recall applause, however, and while I heard Laura called many names by many people during those difficult years, "hero" wasn't one of them.

Hey, I thought, maybe times have changed; maybe social mores are not what they used to be. I decided to consult an expert: a 15-year-old girl named Jackie, who's just started her sophomore year. Jackie isn't old enough to vote, but she's at exactly the age when topics like reproductive rights start to mean something in the concrete: Cousins get pregnant, or that girl your sister knows drops out to have a baby. The Palin family drama, she tells me, has already been a topic of discussion in her Catholic school. I ask if anyone has called Bristol a hero.

She smiles, rolls big blue eyes. "Uhhh, no." In fact, she says, kids talk about Bristol the same way they talked about Jamie Lynn last year — in a "can-you-believe-this-idiot" kind of way. At Jackie's school, the only officially sanctioned talk about sex is that it should occur in the context of officially sanctioned marriage. Or, as some girls say, "Abstinence is bliss." Being a pregnant teen, it seems, is no easier than it ever was.

Of course, judging pregnant girls is as pointless and ill-advised as encouraging two kids barely old enough to drive to get married (as Bristol and her dude are now planning). Go to enough baby showers for teen parents, and their overwhelmed expressions eventually make you understand that what matters to them isn't really your opinion, but your support. Once the choice to give birth has been made, that baby's coming whether you, your mom, the governor or the homeroom mean girls like it or not. And it's not easy even when your parents are on board.

But judging bad public policy is a different thing, and the Palin saga is a reminder that "abstinence only" works only when you're actually abstaining. There's no value in teaching teens not to have sex if you're not also teaching them about the potential consequences should they decide to do it — and schooling them on the alternatives. This, I think, was what was really wrong with the picture at the RNC: that at a time when teen pregnancies are up for the first time in years, politicians like Sarah Palin (and Gov. Rendell, who recently approved making federal funding for abstinence-only programs available to Pennsylvania school districts) are insisting on unrealistic sex-education policies. It's probably more unfortunate and ironic than hypocritical that Palin's daughter got pregnant even as her mother became the telegenic spokesmodel for the right.

For a clear-eyed view on this, I call up Laura, and ask her how she's handled the matter with her teen kids. Forget abstinence-only, she tells me, and focus more on teaching kids about preventing disease and what it's really like to be a teen parent. Talk to them about consequences, not some just-say-no fantasy version of adolescence.

I ask her whether she would even be able to talk to her kids about abstinence with a straight face.

"Oh, I could say it with a straight face. But because I'm real, and because I live in the real world, I know they're not going to listen," she explains. "All we can do is teach them about safe sex."

Amy Z. Quinn blogs at Citizen Mom, quinnchannel.typepad.com.