On Choice

So, there's this story today about Sarah Palin telling an antiabortion group in Evansville, Indiana how she momentarily considered aborting her last child when she learned she was pregnant at an oil and gas conference in another state:

"There, just for a fleeting moment, I thought, I knew, nobody knows me here. Nobody would ever know. I thought, wow, it is easy. It could be easy to think maybe of trying to change the circumstances. No one would know. No one would ever know."

Ultimately, Palin said she realized she had to stay true to what she'd been saying for years -- that "life is valuable because it is ordained."

"I had just enough faith to know that trying to change the circumstances wasn't any answer," Palin said.

But the governor said the experience gave her an appreciation for what women and girls facing unwanted pregnancies go through.

"I do understand what these women, what these girls go through in that thought process."

Bullshit.

Fleetingly considering that you could get away with a secret abortion when you've got the means to support the resulting child isn't the same thing as any woman or girl facing an unwanted pregnancy, 73% of whom cite "can't afford a baby now" as the reason for the termination.

Fleetingly considering that you could get away with a secret abortion when you have government-paid healthcare isn't the same thing as any woman or girl facing an unwanted pregnancy, about one-fourth of whom cite their own health or possible health problems with the fetus as reasons for the termination, owing to concerns including "a lack of prenatal care."

Fleetingly considering that you could get away with a secret abortion when you're a conservative politician with visions of national office who might only end up as Governor of Alaska instead of President of the US if you don't get an abortion isn't the same thing as any woman or girl facing an unwanted pregnancy, many of whom might never finish high school, or might not finish college, or might lose their jobs, if they don't get an abortion.

Just saying that abortion crossed your mind for the briefest instant in an abstract way doesn't give Palin any kind of insight into the experience of a woman or girl who's seriously considering an abortion.

It does, however, give her all the expertise she needs (along with conferring a deeply undeserved air of courageousness for her "brutal honesty") among the retrofuck dunderheads who turn up at anti-choice events to hear her speak. And so when she says to them, "It was a time when I had to ask myself was I gonna walk the walk or I was gonna talk the talk," they can laud both her bravery and unassailable ethics—the flipside of which is implicitly demonizing as amoral cowards all of the women and girls who didn't make the same choice, made ever that much easier by Palin's convenient masking of her fortunate circumstances. What a fucking hero.

One of the greatest ironies of the anti-choice movement is that it is chockablock with people who are rich with choice. The reality is that Palin never had to seriously consider abortion, because she is rich with choice. Her privilege inoculated her against abortion being her only choice—and for that she wants applause, even as her politics cast millions of the women to the opposite fate.