Sarah Palin and Pro-Choice Rhetoric

By Dr. Jeff Mirus ( bio - articles - email ) | Sep 26, 2008

One grows so very tired of pro-choice rhetoric. Listen to Anna Quindlen commenting on Sarah Palin in the September 15th issue of Newsweek:

The governor has talked about the choice she and her pregnant teenage daughter have made, but would deny other women the right to make their own choices. She talks about fighting the old boys’ network and corrupt politicians, but would turn over the private reproductive decisions of American women to both. This is not choosing life. It is choosing unwarranted intrusion into the family lives of women.

Really? So now we are not permitted to make a right choice unless we leave everyone else free to make the wrong choice? Perhaps Sarah Palin knows that excessive freedom to make wrong choices is one reason right choices are harder to make than they should be.

And now the decision of a woman to kill her baby is a “private reproductive decision”? Perhaps Sarah Palin knows that such decisions are intrinsically public, involving two people, one of whom is an unjust aggressor against the other.

And now laws which criminalize public immoral behavior are an “unwarranted intrusion” into family life? Perhaps Sarah Palin does not think of the American mother as a sort of neo-Roman Mater Familias with life and death control over everyone in her family.

Did you know that Quindlen’s column appears on the back page of Newsweek every other week, and is called “The Last Word”? Perhaps Sarah Palin knows that the last word is the one thing Anna Quindlen shouldn’t have.