Recently, Bristol Palin went on national television, and said two highly controversial and shocking things: that it’s better to have a baby when you’re not an unemployed and single teenager who has yet to graduate high school, and that teenagers often have sex with each other. Then her mom came on and explained that, while young women do get knocked up from time to time, if they have good, loving families and financial means (like all decent people are supposed to have), it’s not too big of a tragedy.
Well. That clears that up. Teenagers shouldn’t be having sex, so we shouldn’t educate them or provide contraception, because that would be acknowledging that they’re having sex. But hey, we all realize that really, they’re having sex. But that’s ok, because if they do get pregnant, those who come from loving, well-off families will be just fine! And those who do not come from loving, well-off families, well . . . they should have had loving, well-off families. Or not had sex.
Rebecca Traister puts it better:
To Sarah Palin and Van Susteren’s minds, the real story here was not about cautioning other teens, or preventing teen pregnancies, it was about how to deal with them once they’d — inevitably, it seems — happened. In Van Susteren’s words, about “how important it is for families to pitch in.” The Alaska governor, pausing for a moment of generous reflection, said, “I don’t know how other families do it. If they kind of assume that the young parent is going to make it on their own, or assume that government would take care of the young parent and child. That’s not government’s role. This is a role for families to pitch in and help.”
So the bigger message here, as spun by Greta Van Susteren and Sarah Palin, is that abstinence is a naive peg on which to hang our contraceptive hopes, but that when our daughters reproduce before they finish high school, we need to move beyond it — not to discussions of birth control and abortion, but to the fact that the Palins are an unusually big, helpful, supportive group, and that other less fortunate young mothers should go out and get multigenerational families to help them out because it’s not the government’s responsibility.
Also, Lindsey Beyerstein points out the hypocrisy of the difference in coverage of Bristol Palin and Nadya Suleman:
I’m so sick of hearing disgruntled conservatives railing against “welfare mothers.” If they really value motherhood and childbearing as much as they say, they’ll happily pay for social services to support those families.
Of course, the very same politicians and pundits who score political points off welfare mothers had a field day ranting about birth control in the stimulus–a proposal that would have saved $200 million in healthcare costs alone over the next five years by making it easier for states to cover birth control for the same poor women are currently eligible for pregnancy care under Medicaid. (Since the federal government already matches state Medicaid contraception spending 9-1, the provision would have been a net stimulus for participating states.)
On a related note, the Atlantic bloggers have been having an interesting back-and-forth about shame. Here, Ta-Nehisi Coates takes issue with the “70% of black children are born out of wedlock” statistic:
To summarize–there is no data to show that the black “illegitimacy” figure of 70 percent has been caused by unmarried black women having more kids than they did in the past. In fact, the trend is the exact opposite. What is clear is that the behavior of married black women has changed, to the point that married black women are actually having less kids than married white women.
Megan McArdle thinks shame has its uses:
It is true that people who are ashamed often do not behave well. But they often behave badly precisely because they are trying to deflect their shame. People do a lot of things to avoid being shamed. Why do small towns have lower rates of crime, and lesser antisocial behaviors like cutting people off in traffic or queue jumping, than big cities? Are people in small towns more inherently virtuous? Or are they afraid of what the neighbors will think?
. . . When people make bad choices, a culture of shame and stigma can make their lot in life worse, not better. . . . [H]uman beings what they are, social stigmas are usually effective precisely because they create suffering, and exclusion, and cautionary tales. Therefore it’s not quite right to say, as Rod does, that lifting the stigma on unwed childbearing involved “false compassion.” The compassion involved was and is real, and so are its beneficiaries. Many lives really were improved as American society became more tolerant of unwed motherhood – just as many lives were improved when divorce became easier to obtain, and bad marriages easier to walk away from, and so on.
But many other lives were not. And so the battle between social conservatism and social liberalism at the moment isn’t a battle between competing utopias, but a battle over which tragic choice is worse: The choice to stigmatize, which can damage and even ruin lives, or the choice to destigmatize, which can damage and ruin countless lives as well.
Andrew Sullivan notes the difficulty of destigmatizing:
But what if, in fact, there is no actual “choice” to destigmatize? What if the cruelty of some social norms – such as the way in which illegitimate children were once treated – leads to a gradual and irreversible social change? The real choice today in many areas is whether to re-stigmatize – and that is a very hard thing to do in a diverse, free and changing society. . . . Surely the more reasonable option is simply not to encourage socially disadvantageous behavior (as welfare once did), and to create a model of successful family structure that others might emulate. Obama’s marriage and family are probably much more effective in this than a lecture about abstinence from Rick Santorum.
Two things about shaming: first of all, anyone who feels they have enough moral authority to confidently shame other people probably has no self-awareness and should not be the person responsible for determining which behaviors are to be stigmatized and which rewarded. I mean, really, who the hell does anybody think they are?
And second, damn near all of the shaming I see in our society (and now I think about it, in most others, now and throughout history) is directed at victims. Often, people shame to reassure themselves they couldn’t possibly fall prey to poverty, disease, abuse, crime, etc., because they’re not stupid or careless or immoral like this or that victim.
(And speaking of situations in which the victim is always thoroughly shamed and blamed, I appreciated this article, which boldly declares that rapists are rapists, even if they’re also stars.)
