As National Review's in-house demography bore, I've been struck this last week by the left's fierce hostility to Sarah Palin's fecundity. One gentleman - well, okay, maybe not a "gentleman" but certainly an impeccably sensitive progressive new male - wrote to me from Shelton, Washington:
This abortion prohibitionist hag won't cut it among women with brains.
And BTW she is a good example of reproduction run amok. 5 kids; 1 retard. I wonder if the bitch ever heard of getting spayed.
Each to her own, Mister Sensitive. You can be a 44-year old mother of five expecting her first grandchild and serving as Governor of Alaska. Or you can be, like Martha Stewart's daughter Alexis, a 43-year old single "career woman" hosting a satellite radio show and spending $28,000 a month on "intracytoplasmic sperm injection" in hopes of becoming pregnant. Every woman has the "right to choose" her own path through life, but it's a lazy assumption to take for granted that most Americans find Sarah Palin's choices as freakish as our metropolitan elites do.
What was it the feminists used to say? "You can have it all." Sarah Palin is a mom, and the first female governor of her state. But the enforcers at the National Organization of Women dismiss her as "more a conservative man than she is a woman".
Golly. These days, NOW seems to have as narrow and proscriptive a view of what women are permitted to be as any old 1950s sitcom dad. |