Again, Palin models how women can have both brains and wombs, careers and children, including disabled children. And more power to her.

However, most women are not in the privileged position of a governor or vice presidential candidate, who no doubt can hire assistants, afford to have her spouse take time off his job or take time off her job for that matter when needed, and to access the very best, most comprehensive health care and social services.

Palin identifies herself as a prolife feminist and a member of Feminists for Life. FFL long ago was an original sponsor of the Family and Medical Leave Act--I was there and part of that effort.

The FMLA was/is a start but so many Americans cannot afford to take even a few days out of the three months *unpaid* leave that it guarantees. Will Palin support turning that unpaid leave into paid?

Will she support paid maternity and paternity leave?

Will she endorse the Healthy Families Act so that US workers can take sick days?

Will she support and expand free early intervention services for children with developmental and other disabilities whose families cannot afford those hugely expensive but vital services?

Will she reform--in the sense of improving and making more humane, not doing away with or tossing them to the private market--social security programs for disabled children and workers, so that applicants and their families are dealt prompt, just decisions instead of being all treated as con artists and being strung along for years before they get the funds they are medically and ethically entitled to?

Will she support raising the average SSI payment above the $600-some dollars a month it is now--not enough in many, many places to even pay the rent on a studio apartment?

Will she support and expand programs like SCHIP and Medicaid so that all uninsured children, born and unborn, and their families are completely covered? What about WIC, so that all children and mothers can get proper nutrition in this time of rising food prices?

Will she support equal pay for women? A living wage for all? More government grants for students so they won't have to spend 30 years straggling along to pay off student loans--or, worse, giving up on the hope of college at all?

She is married to a person of Inuit descent. Will she address the economic and health disparities that afflict and even kill people of color in this nation?

And does she keep in mind how the lack of comprehensive family-friendly policies, including pro-disabled person and pro people of color policies, in this country, causes so many women to have abortion, because their economic and employment situations make pregnancy appear an unbearable nightmare--and most understandably so?

Is she aware that countries with policies like the abovementioned--and many more--have abortion rates that are a fraction of that in the US?

I would really like some indepth answers to these questions from Palin, beyond "hands off the free market, limited government." If she is to be a role model for women, she needs to do everything she can so all other women in this nation can shine, too...women are constrained and afflicated by matters beyond their control, but which can be altered by good public policies

You raise some interesting points but I would be leery of the government running all the things about which you speak. Bureaucracy generally gums up the works rather than helps.

On this point though: "Is she aware that countries with policies like the abovementioned--and many more--have abortion rates that are a fraction of that in the US?"

To be fair, most of those countries are European and have much more restrictive abortion laws than the U.S. The policies don't necessarily have a causative effect on the rate of abortion as much as the prohibition of abortions does.

Although a few for profit companies make some of these benefits available to their workers. ..the free market hasn't voluntarily and universally protected all these human rights--rights in their own right as well as necessary to reduce abortion.

If a woman can't square going to term--let alone decades of raising the child-- with just being able to pay the bills and keep a roof over her head, she is either going to get an abortion, or endure other pretty much societally imposed sufferings than no mother deserves to have, either. It happens every day.

Few employers have much sympathy, either--pregnancy discrimination and maternal profiling are rampant despite the laws on the books against these practices. The laws simply can't be enforced because they are not part of an entire, publicly as well as privately committed supportive system around pregnant and parenting women.


Speaking as someone who's worked in human services serving the maternal child population...It's not bureaucracy per se, it's the political refusal to design, fully and continuously fund and implement programs that actually serve the interests of the people they ostensibly serve.

"Gumming-up" bureaucracy is not an inherent flaw in government commitment to address social problems. It is a serious, serious design flaw that can be removed--the solution is not to totally scrap or cut programs past the bone but to have a more not less generous public attitude and commitment towards them..to recognize that human needs are real and valid and widespread and not "scams" of the "undeserving" to steal taxpayers' hard-earned dollars...

The illegality of abortion may deter some women. But aside from the question of whether or not and to what extent abortion is legal, why should any woman be damned to struggle even more for survival if she goes to term? What kind of "reward" is that for choosing life? Been there, done that, and it's a b*tch......

And now, 20 years later, my daughter, mother of a disabled unplanned baby, is going through not much better times, here in the good ole US of A, one of Earth's most materially rich countries...but sometimes very stingy and miserly, not rich in its heart...

The most decisive question for whether women have abortions is not so much the legalization/illegalization question--howver important that may be. It is the whole societal environment facing women's sexual and reproductive lives.

In Latin America, that environment is extremely bleak, including deep, deep poverty and a lack of women's rights. And so women have very high abortion rates despite illegalization.

By contrast, in many Western European countries, the laws may be more restrictive than here, but perhaps even more important is that women live in a much friendlier environment. Combining economic survival--even wellbeing--with pregnancy and parenthood is simply not the unending cascade of hardships it so frequently is in this country.

And..dare I say this too on this conservatively-toned website ...all people have access to comprehensive sex education and contraception.