Word: bristol
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...just "a clear bid to help Mama rise higher in the Republican Party," said Fox News contributor Ellen Ratner. "It doesn't look good for a future presidential hopeful to have a daughter who had a child and did not marry the dad. They had to re-brand Bristol Palin so that she fits into the conservative base." It was a mixed message, others charged: "Don't have sex as a teenager, but if you do, you might end up a happy celebrity with this beautiful baby." Still others disqualified her from preaching abstinence having clearly not practiced it herself...
...Except that life is much messier and all the odds were against them, and in a real sense it diminishes Bristol's challenge, and her clear determination to meet it, to pretend otherwise. Only 4 in 10 teenage mothers finish high school; less than 2% of girls who have babies under 18 will finish college by the time they are 30; just waiting until 20 or 21 increases the odds fourfold. Two thirds of families of young unwed mothers are poor. When pregnant teens do marry, they are 50% more likely to get divorced than those who marry without being...
...Bristol's main message as she stepped out this week was only partially about abstinence. It was more about parenthood: that it is hard, and exhausting, and bittersweet to hold your blessed child in your arms and wonder at him, while knowing that your friends are at the movies, and your term paper is due, and everything that was supposed to be normal right now is hovering just out of your reach. "I'm just here to tell teens this is a really hard job," Bristol told Matt Lauer. "It's not like an accessory on your...
...abstinence, Bristol has been right all along. She was right back in February when she said it was "not realistic," she is right now when she says practicing it is hard, and she's right that it is much better and safer for kids to postpone having sex. She also advocates that kids who have sex should use contraception. This has always been the embedded irony of the fight over sex education. The increased emphasis on abstinence in the past 15 years has been one factor in pushing back the age at which kids have their first sexual encounters, reducing...
...This message isn't hard; it just isn't as tidy as Just Do It or Just Say No. So Bristol Palin, in all her complexity as target and role model, sitting there with the beautiful baby she wishes hadn't been born for another 10 years, is a perfectly natural messenger...