Stephanie Miller and Her Producer Ponder: How Do We Know Palin and Bachmann Have Not Had Abortions?

Stephanie Miller loathes Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann and one of the ways she expresses her contempt is through ludicrous speculation.

On her radio show last week, for example, Miller and her producer, Chris Lavoie, along with actor Hal Sparks, took a gratuitous whack at Palin and Bachmann (audio after page break, courtesy of The Radio Equalizer) --

MILLER: Speaking of crazy right-wing newspaper columns, in the Washington Examiner a syndicated columnist, Cal Thomas, claimed that Palin along with Bachmann get a lot of media attention because they represent everything the liberal media hate. They're attractive women who are married to the same men they started with. He went onto write, in Palin's case she and her husband have a Down syndrome child who she refused to abort. Right there you have to offend pro-choice feminists who treat abortion as a sacrament.

LAVOIE: Oh! There are so many things wrong with that piece.

MILLER: Yeah, where do you even start there? We hate them because they haven't been divorced or had abortions, which apparently ...

SPARKS: No, that's actually why Newt Gingrich hates them.

LAVOIE: Yeah, Michelle Obama hasn't been divorced and hasn't had an abortion. As far as we know.

MILLER: Yeah, yeah. I don't, hmm ...

LAVOIE: And how do we know that Sarah Palin or Michele Bachmann have never had an abortion?

MILLER: Yes!

LAVOIE: Do we know that?! I think Cal Thomas is making a giant assumption there.

How do we know Palin hasn't had an abortion? Because when she was pregnant with her fifth child and he was diagnosed with Down syndrome, Palin took the road far less traveled. In this circumstance, more than 90 percent of expectant mothers undergo an abortion. If Palin were inclined to have done so, this would have been when, and none of us would have ever heard of Trig Palin.

In an Oct. 27, 2008 article for The Weekly Standard titled "Loathing Sarah Palin: The Two Months Hate of feminists," Joseph Epstein wrote --

Strongly liberal women get most agitated over the issue -- though of course to them it is no issue but a long since resolved matter -- of abortion. Abortion, to be sure, is the great third-rail subject in American politics. But when a male politician is against abortion, these women can write that off as the ignorance of a standard politician, if not himself a Christian fundamentalist, then another Republican cynically going after the fundamentalist vote. A woman not in favor of abortion is something quite different.

And it is all the more strikingly different when the same woman not only holds this opinion on abortion but acts on it and knowingly bears a child with Down syndrome, a child that most liberal women would have thought reason required aborting. What else, after all, is abortion for? (emphasis added)

... (The) rage in their reaction to Governor Palin is emphatically what I do sense on the part of liberal women -- that and delight in any attempt to humiliate her. (Tina Fey, take a bow, and hey, let's watch that Katie Couric YouTube interview one more time!) I wonder if the women who loathe Sarah Palin with such intensity oughtn't perhaps to reexamine the source of their strongly illiberal feelings.

How do we know Bachmann hasn't had an abortion? In addition to being a mother of five, "she and her husband helped raise 23 teenage foster children in their home, as many as four at a time," wrote Stephen Moore in a June 11-12 profile for the Wall Street Journal. "They succeeded in getting all 23 through high school and later founded a charter school."

Palin and Bachmann have raised 10 children between them -- with Bachmann also adopting -- while each woman is still married to the man she married decades ago.

I'll stick my neck out and venture to suggest that abortion leads to fewer children, not an abundance of them.