Bioethics, healthcare policy, and related issues.
The Sarah Palin nomination is so ludicrous it’s hard to grasp. People are still trying to get a handle on what it means, and what the relevant aspects of her tissue-thin background are. There’s been a lot of good commentary so far, including her relatively minor political experience, all of it in (literally) bush-league environs, and the obvious pandering – to pro-Hillary defectors and religious-right goons – that constitutes the only justification for her nomination. There is also her utter lack of background or preparation for assuming the Presidency without warning – as is her most important, and almost sole, Constitutional responsibility. And there is her apparent penchant for using her office and state agencies for personal vendettas. No doubt all of this will get more thoroughly aired, as it should. (My only fear is that McCain will come to his senses before the official nomination and force her to “reluctantly withdraw” to “spend more time with her family” – I want her on the GOP ticket!)
But there has been some other stuff entering into the discussion that I think is very ugly and ill-advised. Of course there have been some idiotic sexist remarks (and some equally idiotic attempted defenses of her “women’s work” as a qualification for President that are just as sexist in their condescension); that’s bad enough. And it’s hard to know just how to evaluate her “life story”, since much of her qualification for office – according to those who support her – is that she hunts moose and has a passle of kids. If they really think those are qualifications*, then it’s fair game to point out that they are not.
But there are other personal issues that are not fair game.
I hardly like to even bring the subject up, but it should be confronted. There are all kinds of weird rumors going around about Palin and her kids. Many people have suggested that her last child, born when Palin was 44 years old and not known to have been pregnant at the time, was actually the child of Palin’s oldest teenage daughter, who had dropped out of school claiming illness for over 6 months leading up to the birth. In addition, that child was born with Down Syndrome, and some other clown is now posting suggesting that that condition was the result of Sarah Palin’s behavior during the pregnancy. Alan Colmes has suggested Palin could have endangered the fetus by traveling more than 9 hours to a rural Alaskan hospital, rather than go to any of the many larger and closer hospitals, while supposedly in labor. (Note that the two rumors conflict with one another.)
Aside from this being a highly personal issue (and, if the rumor about the teenage mother is true, then apparently something the family does not want to acknowledge), it’s hard to see what legitimate relevance it has. Once, this would have been a career-killing scandal; thankfully, as the result of progressive social activism and the victories for women’s reproductive freedom that Palin herself opposes, there are now many options for forming families, and one’s personal choices in that regard are granted much more respect. Ironically, it is only Palin’s own base that would find anything scandalous in this. But it can certainly be used to create discomfort for the candidate and her family, and, again, among all the irrelevant lightweight issues Palin brings to the campaign, this seems to bear no relation to the question of her fitness for office.
To deliberately pick on an uncomfortable and private issue for the purpose of embarrassing or harassing a candidate is despicable. And to use women’s reproductive choices as weapons against them only involves us in the worst abuses of the right wing. This is absolutely the sort of thing we – decent progressives who support women’s freedom to choose their reproductive pathway – must not be doing. Yet highly-visible blogs like DailyKos and Andrew Sullivan (not a defender of choice, it’s true) are pushing the issue, and others are spreading it with their concern-trolling.**
There is perhaps one argument that makes the issue sound relevant, and that is the question of hypocrisy. The religious right and the GOP are on hair-trigger to judge other people’s lifestyles, family structures, and reproductive choices, so when one of them finds themselves enmeshed in a “non-traditional family” saga, perhaps we are entitled to some schadenfreude? And perhaps we are, but the only decent response is to welcome that family to the community of freedom of choice and freedom from condemnation. Palin, as far as I know, has not been one of the overt persecutors of others in that respect, and does not deserve to be persecuted in return.
Lee Stranahan, of the Huffington Post, offers this odd defense:
The whole story is based on an insulting view of fundamentalist Christians; that they’d be so freaked out by a teenage pregnancy that they’d have the Governor — the most highly visible and public women in the small fishbowl of Alaska — fake a pregnancy to cover up the sins her of daughter Bristol.
Actually, I find that perfectly possible to believe. But it’s just as much none of our business as it is none of theirs. We’ve got to stop making political fodder out of people’s health and reproduction, out of their attempts to just live their lives as best they can by their own lights, without interfering with anyone else. I have little hope that this story – whatever is behind it – will have any such effect on the GOP; in fact I have little hope that it will even encourage Sarah Palin to think that women who make different reproductive choices from hers might deserve the kind of privacy and respect that she wants for herself. But if we’re going to see a future in which people have the freedom and security to live their own lives and make their own choices, we have to let everyone do so, even those who oppose that freedom for others. We can’t let ourselves be the thing we oppose and expect anything good to come of it.
Update: Palin herself has just announced that the rumors her 17-year-old daughter had the baby (Trig) in May are false, because . . . the daughter is pregnant now.
ST. PAUL (Reuters) – The 17-year-old daughter of Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin is pregnant, Palin said on Monday in an announcement intended to knock down rumors by liberal bloggers that Palin faked her own pregnancy to cover up for her child.
That would seem to lay the other rumor to rest. It also explains why the daughter was seen wearing an engagement ring – she’s marrying the father of her expected baby (yes, 17 years old, with a baby and a husband, neither of which she planned for). Palin has requested privacy for her family over that issue, and again it seems to me they ought to have it. This does raise the tantalizing question of how her insane fundie supporters are going to react, but I think we know the answer to that already: they would be screaming and howling at any Democrat who made the same announcement, but nothing matters if you’re a Republican, so it’ll be just fine.
* I’m highly suspicious that any of her supporters actually believe she is qualified for this office, or that they really mean the things they say in claiming so.
** I hope that’s not what I’m doing here, also. That’s not my intent, at least.
[Crossposted from my group political blog, Lean Left.]
Update: Revised description of one of the rumors; my original explanation was wrong.
4 Responses to “Offensive Line-Crossing”
Leave a Reply
Logged in as . Logout »
September 1st, 2008 at 8:42 AM
I commented on this from a political perspective over at Lean Left, but I’m a little curious about your take on one particular bioethical wrinkle.
It seems to me that if Palin is claiming her daughter’s child as her own (my own guess is that she isn’t, but let’s say, for the sake of argument, she is), the deception is most likely going to require some falsification of medico-legal documents: birth records, insurance claims, that pile of forms that you fill out when you take your kid to a new pediatrician for the first time. So here’s my question: what’s your take on the ethics of falsifying another person’s medical records? Are there times when it’s okay and times when it’s not? Do your motives matter? What’s your sense of the terrain here?
September 1st, 2008 at 3:38 PM
[NB: As noted above, the story about the baby switcheroo appears to have been false. But Brooklynite's questions are good. The discussion below is predicated on a hypothetical scenario in which a birth is falsely attributed to the wrong mother.]
First, it’s not certain that she would have to falsify any medical records. All the involved parties’ records (those of the grandmother, the mother, and the newborn) could be medically accurate, and they could simply state publicly that the grandmother was the mother, relying on medical confidentiality, like priestly confession, to prevent the release of the truth even though the medical staff would know the story was false. That’s obviously taking a big risk (and note, too, that it’s not just medical records, but insurance company records as well, that are relevant). In practical terms, it would be hard to keep such a story secret. But it would not likely be the actual written medical record that would be the problem.
As for those records, the accuracy and security of medical records is of great importance, but it is emphasized as an ethical issue for the protection of the patient. Though there are obviously practical reasons why, in general, you don’t want false information in your medical history, I have no problem with people faking their own records if necessary to protect some important personal value – and in these days of decreasing privacy, that is a more-than-plausible scenario.
In this case, the records in question include those of her almost-adult, reproductively emancipated daughter, and, of course, those of the newborn as well. Both could have serious consequences if, for instance, the daughter needed treatment for a post-natal condition and her records did not reveal that she had ever actually been pregnant, or if the newborn has some genetic condition (not Down Syndrome) in which parentage is a relevant factor, and the child’s records were inaccurate in that regard. Those are unlikely but very real possibilities that up the ante on the practical risk falsifying these records poses. But those are, again, mostly practical questions.
As to the ethics of leaving false information in both her daughter’s and the newborn’s medical records, for the adult daughter there is the question of whether she herself gave a fully informed consent to such a deception, or perhaps does not realize the implications of what is being done. For the newborn, the grandmother would obviously be acting as the healthcare proxy, and there is no question of the child’s giving consent; however, the grandmother is obviously acting in this case out of regard for her own public reputation and that of her daughter, not the immediate interests of the newborn, so there is a real conflict there. The summary, from an ethical point of view, is that being deceptive about the newborn’s parentage would certainly be questionable in respect of the adult daughter’s rights and interests, and there is a clear conflict between the grandmother’s role and interests in respect of her public persona, and her obligations to promote the newborn’s interests in her role as decisionmaker. Arguably, that child’s interests might include knowing who her real mother is.
That does not make the deceptive practice obviously wrong – but it makes it obviously questionable. It requires much more in the way of defense or justification to explain why it would be OK to do this, given that at least three people’s interests are involved but only one of them (it seems) is making the decisions, and largely for her own benefit. But such a justification could perhaps be given: the real mother understands the situation and feels satisfied with it; there are tangible benefits to the baby in not being associated with a teenage mother because the family belongs to a highly judgmental and repressive church, for instance.
So, like so many issues, the bottom line is: “it depends”. But note that it depends on a variety of contingent, practical factors having to do with the interests and consent of the parties involved, not, I think, a bald rule about the sanctity of medical records.
As for the legal aspects, that also depends on just what was falsified. It’s not illegal to falsify medical records, either in the hospital or at your doctor’s office – it’s just a bad idea. If the grandmother made a claim for insurance benefits in her own name, that would be insurance fraud and breach of contract, which have criminal and civil legal implications, respectively. The one form I can think of that is legally required and would have to be falsified is the record of birth, which lists the child’s parents and is the basis for the birth certificate. I have no idea what the penalty is for falsifying that information, but I doubt it’s very high, and I suspect it’s fairly commonly done. (It was the standard method of informal adoption of babies of “wayward girls” for generations.)
As for motives, I’m never very impressed by that. I’m more interested in the questions “What did/will you do?” and “What were/will be the consequences?” But, as I note above, listing non-birth parents, including aunts/uncles or grandparents, as the birth parents of a “love child”, as a means of putting over a de facto adoption, is an old practice. The motive is fairly obvious.
You can certainly argue that it would be better if we simply had a society that did not condemn people for their choices regarding pregnancy and parenting, and you can argue at least as strongly that the far-right religious people who are largely the source of that problem deserve less sympathy than others when it becomes their problem all of a sudden. But, given who we are and where we’ve come from, it’s easy to understand why people do these things, even as we hope the necessity of them will eventually pass away. And we can have sympathy for those motives, as distorted and unhealthy as they are.
September 25th, 2008 at 11:55 AM
Kevin,
Remember me? We met at Rob’s book launch party in NYC… Wow, I’m finally stopping by. You have thought a lot about this, clearly.
I agree with you about Sarah Palin’s privacy and respecting what her family is dealing with.
What bothers me is this: if Sarah Palin gets elected, she will be pushing abstinence education all over the country.
No, I’m NOT proposing that teens have sex. I’m saying that teens need a place to talk openly and honestly, they need adults whom they can trust. Clearly, setting up strict rules around sex — like no-abstinence education — does not work. Look at what happened with priests in our country.
If Sarah Palin is supporting her daughter as a teen mom — and insisting that she get married — that’s her business. But I fear this will be her message to girls all around the country.
January 16th, 2009 at 9:34 AM
Why must we persist in trying to find the worst in a person and if it doesn’t exist we find reasons why it couold be true. Find the good things and spend time extolling the positive.