OS blogger gmgaston wrote a great post today on "Bristol Palin, Single Mother," (as did my friend silkstone!) talking about the announcement that Sarah Palin's daughter had split with her boyfriend, Levi Johnson. He gave a great analysis and asked some provocative questions, and since my answers were spilling out over the confines of  a comment, I thought I would just blog on it myself.

(I promised myself I was going on a Palin diet, but I also promised I was going to limit my consumption of Cadbury Mini Eggs, and that isn't working out too well, either.)

Go read gmgaston's  (and silkstone's) piece(s) and come on back. I'll wait.

The big question, of course, is: assuming she knew Bristol was pregnant before John McCain offered her the VP slot, should she have agreed to run?

The answer really had to be "yes." Any career politician with half a brain knows a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity when they see it -- especially a woman politician being offered the chance to write her name in the history books. Only a fool would turn that down, no matter what the potential fallout.     

Sarah Palin is hardly the first politician to try to turn the sow's ear of family scandal and turn it into a silk purse for the masses. It's the inevitable consequences of a political environment where a candidate's family, friends, barbers and dogwalkers become "fair game" for public scrutiny, and it's not always an easy thing to do.  

Look at the contortions Hillary Clinton has had to put herself through all these years in her effort to avoid too much scrutiny of her marriage to a charter member of the Brotherhood of the the Traveling Pants.

Or -- speaking of wayward trousers -- look at John Edwards, who built a large part of his political persona around his perfect marriage to his cancer-stricken wife while carrying on with (and probably impregnating) a flaky party-girl-turned-yoga-instructor. More than six months on he's still hardly able to go out in public.

 If every politician were scared away by criticism, nobody would ever run for office.

The Palins and the McCain campaign as a whole actually did a pretty good job keeping the news low-key. They admitted the pregnancy only when they had to, pointed out it was not an ideal situation but that they loved their daughter and the family was pulling together to deal with the situation, and deemed the conversation over.

The media -- made up in large part of parents who either had teens, were going to have teens, or had survived having teens -- pretty much agreed. You didn't hear much about the story after the initial burst, and Bristol was not seen much after the Republican convention. It should have ended there.

But the story was mostly kept alive by people...like us. Bloggers, pundits, and the like. It was really in that forum that the pregnancy was politicized, on both sides. The pro-life base loved the story because it showed that, as with her decision to carry her son Trigg after she learned he would have Down Syndrome, Palin walked the pro-life walk. The liberal base loved it because it screamed of irony, hypocrisy, and white-trashiness. There was a little something for everyone, and occasionally, it was even a worthwhile discussion. 

As to the abstinence-only issue, one thing to keep in mind is that, whatever her mother's political position on the subject, Bristol Palin didn't go to an abstinence-only school. Wasilla High School, so far as anyone knows, has a health curriculum that includes information on birth control. Alaska has a high accessibility rate for family planning clinics, with about 81% of all women (and 71% of teens) able to reach publicly-funded contraceptive services. Minors don't require parental consent to obtain contraception. The state ranks 30th in teen pregnancy rates.

Bristol Palin was one of an estimated 1,770 Alaskan teens who either couldn't or didn't avail themselves of these services -- or, who didn't use contraception consistently. Nationwide, she's part of a much bigger club. About 11% of all U.S. births are to teen mothers, with about 750,000 girls between the ages of 15-19 become pregnant and about 472,500 going on to give birth.

The debate over the best way to reduce teen pregnancy is going to be going on when little Tripp Palin is a surly teenager himself. There will always be people like his grandma, who believe that sex education is a moral issue best left to parents. There will always be people who think that you should start teach sex-ed as early as possible. There's no one answer and no "right" answer.

As human beings, we become highly fertile before we're emotionally equipped to parent. Like many things in life, it's something that each individual and each family has to cope with as it develops. Bristol Palin has a tough road ahead of her, and I, for one, wish her luck.