The Bristol Conundrum

 

 

"Such a pretty girl with so much potential. What happened?"

Wow! What a week this has been. The country has been rocked by Supreme Court rulings, ISIL has shown us newer, bolder, and bloodier ways to kill innocents, and Bristol Palin is pregnant (again). In this new age of "anything goes", this should not surprise anyone. However, considering how she was raised and with her name recognition, it did catch me off guard.

I might as well get my Neanderthal rant out of the way. I have said this before. When my generation was Bristol's age, birth control was not that easy to obtain. As a minor, you needed your parents permission, even to by condoms. Ergo, not many people used birth control. And not very many girls got pregnant. The reason should be easy to figure out.

Today - birth control is handed out like candy. All forms of birth control. For both guys and gals. One would think that unintended pregnancies would be as rare as hen's teeth. Just the opposite has happened. In some communities, the unwed pregnancy rate is over 70%.

After being up in Alaska (even Wasilla), I know things to do up there can be somewhat limiting in the off-season. But not every young girl I saw up there was pregnant or hauling around a young one. So at age 17, Bristol had her baby, Tripp. It turns out she started having sex at age 15. In her words, she lost her virginity when she was drunk. No, I am not spreading rumors. This is taken from the interview she had with Barbra Walters. She continued to have sex with her then boyfriend Levi and then slipped up on taking her birth control.

Now I bring her past up not to be sordid, not be judgmental, but to be instructive. Shortly after she had Tripp, she found her moral code once again. She became a type of Carrie Nation for abstinence. She was all over the place giving talks about how important it was to be chaste, to stay pure for your husband. Actually, she did very well on the lecture circuit using that theme.

Now here she is, pregnant again with no husband. Obviously the chaste thing did not work out very well. As I said, I am not judging her. Trust me, I am the last one who should judge anyone. However, it amazes me how some young people can self destruct. The fact she is having a second child out of wedlock is not highly unusual these days. But now she has lost all credibility - maybe forever.

I don't know if we are going to hear much from or about Bristol Palin anymore. She has become nothing more than an asterisk to history. So pretty, so much potential. She still may make something special out of her life. That is, if she can grow up first.