I know I said I’d do nothing else on Palin but I just came across this post at Cornell Professor Michael Dorf’s personal blog.
While decrying the GOP’s vetting procedure Dorf makes a point I’ve not seen anywhere else – the massive disconnect between evangelist Palin’s professed anti-abortionism and her having amniocentesis while pregnant herself:
….one acquires the information available through an amniocentesis only at the small but real risk of terminating the pregnancy. This is why younger women are generally not offered an amniocentesis at all — the risk of miscarriage is too great to justify the procedure. For a person in a higher-risk category (an older woman, for example) who either will or might terminate a pregnancy on the basis of a positive result, this risk might be worth taking. But for a person who will not abort no matter what the result is, it would not appear to be. This makes me think that,
at least for the moment that she decided to have an amniocentesis, Sarah Palin considered having an abortion. I do not say this to be unkind. I think that Sarah Palin and her husband made a noble choice by taking the pregnancy to term. In addition to the love they showed to their new baby by deciding to keep him, they also demonstrated forcefully to their other four children that their love for them is unconditional. I also do not fault her for having the amniocentesis. When a woman is pregnant, she is so intimately connected with her baby and yet so ignorant about the baby’s progress without a doctor or midwife to give her information. An amniocentesis provides information in an otherwise frustratingly opaque setting. I do, however, fault Sarah Palin for wanting to deprive American women of a choice that she herself had and that she apparently thought about making. Though McCain supporters present her choice to take her pregnancy to term as a principled pro-life choice, it behooves everyone to remember that it was in fact a choice and that in the ideal world envisioned by Sarah Palin and John McCain, no other woman could ever choose again, except by visiting the back alley.
[My emphasis.]
Exactly. Dorf has put his finger right on the hollow centre of Palin’s ‘just another fundy hockey Mom like you’ appeal to the Republican religious base.
Not that the hypocrisy would register with that hysterical crowd pushed so close together for the cameras in that half-empty stadium last night, screeching Palin’s name like politically-possessed banshees and all but rolling around and speaking in tongues in the aisle – or at least that’s how it sounded on the World Service at a bleary 5am. Were the party bigwigs handing out crystal meth or something?
