A mother questions Palin's choice

By Maria Archangelo

At the start of this column, I feel the need to put all of my cards on the table. I am a working mother (and have been working mostly full time since my children were born). I am the daughter of a mother who worked from the time I was 3 years old. I was raised Roman Catholic in an Irish-German neighborhood in Philadelphia. I have many family members who became pregnant as teens. Most kept their babies; most got married.

In all of the situations, there was despair, difficulties and, most of the time, divorce. Some wonderful children were born, and we felt lucky to have them in our family.

So, for these reasons, or maybe in spite of them, I have become a little obsessed about Sarah Palin and the revelation this week that she decided to run for vice president of the United States on the heels of the news that her 17-year-old daughter is pregnant.

The whole Sarah Palin thing is a little bit of a struggle for me. It isn’t that I would ever vote for her (I couldn’t be more opposed to most of her political views), but I find myself strangely preoccupied with her decision to run for the nation’s second-highest office at this point in her life.

Forget that she has a small baby at home. I juggled a full-time job while nursing my son for 18 months. I doubt I would have taken a really big promotion to a really demanding position at that time in my life, but who knows? No one has ever asked me to be vice president.

The bigger issue for me is that she has chosen to put herself in the international spotlight in the midst of a family tragedy.

For the pregnancy of a 17-year-old high school student is nothing less than a family tragedy in my eyes.

I have a 15-year-old daughter. I have no illusions that my home is immune to this scenario (although I am doing everything in my power to make sure it doesn’t happen).

But if it did happen, I would like to think that my daughter and our family would become my No. 1 priority. There would be anger and disappointment, but there would also have to be a coming together. Private decisions with lifelong implications would be made. Creating an environment of support and love would be paramount.

I find it incomprehensible that I would willingly put my daughter in a situation where I would be inviting strangers to read her boyfriend’s MySpace profile and scrutinizing every picture of her to see evidence of a pregnancy bump.

Let’s be clear here. If Bristol Palin came to her mother the day after she was nominated at the Republican National Convention and revealed that she was pregnant, I would not be writing this column.

The fact is, her mother knew about the pregnancy before she said yes to John McCain. Sarah Palin made the choice to put her daughter’s personal tragedy before the world and to hold her up to ridicule and shame.

To me, that reveals something very dark about Ms. Palin. And it makes me want to give her 17-year-old daughter a big, reassuring hug.

Maria Archangelo is editor and publisher of the Waterbury Record.