Error: Unable to create directory /home/demockra/public_html/wp-content/uploads/2010/09. Is its parent directory writable by the server? The choice that Sarah Palin doesn’t want other women to have

Jon Stewart has spent the week of the Republican National Convention arguing that Sarah Palin and John McCain’s repeated pleas for privacy are irrelevant in the specific case of Palin’s daughter’s pregnancy. His reasoning is that Palin’s daughter, Bristol, made the decision to go through with the pregnancy (and, according to the campaign, it was Bristol’s decision). At the very same time, Palin is staunchly against permitting any such choice for women in the form of keeping abortion legal.

The hypocrisy is clear: Palin wants her own daughter to have a choice, but she does not want to allow every other women in the country to have that same choice. The government will decide what is best for every other woman. In a United States governed the way Palin would prefer, Bristol would not have that choice. There would have been no choice. Bristol could have had the baby or broken the law and had an abortion illegally.

Even more germane is the fact that the Republicans have chosen to make the issue of abortion — and personal morality in general — a central plank of their platform. Since Palin is in serious danger of not practicing what she preaches, especially when what she preaches is an issue of public policy, those elements of her private life that reveal hypocrisy are fair game for criticism.

By the by, the only reason Bristol is not having an abortion is due to her mother’s national prominence. Ask anyone who has gone to a high-end, private girls’ school: they don’t have babies. They have abortions. Rich parents, even those whose daughters go to Catholic school, don’t let their daughters have babies while they’re teenagers. They quietly send them out to have abortions before anyone discovers that the daughters are pregnant. For Bristol to have an abortion now would have been the most hypocritical thing anyone could have done.