Sarah Palin and San Vicente: Baby Mama Drama

Like the rest of the world (no, I'm not completely out of touch here in Argentina), I too learned last week that John McCain had picked Sarah Palin as governor. And like the rest of the world, I was surprised.

Like the rest of the world, I knew very little about Sarah Palin. I knew she is the governor of Alaska and, like, that's cool; I knew she was the mayor of a town called Wasilla and, like, that's cool; I knew that she's a woman and, like, that's cool...but other than that, I was pretty clueless about this person suddenly shoved into the national spotlight.

It's seems like the McCain campaign followed a similar line of reasoning.

After more research, I learned that Sarah Palin is not as "cool" as I originally thought. My Jews for Obama listserv called her "the female Bush" for her evangelical-biased policies; Zach informed me that she's very pro-life; another site chided her out for uniquely un-green policies(I think we need a word for the opposite of green...orange?), and Wikipedia told me that Wasilla, the town that brought her to Alaskan glory, has a population of somewhere between five- and nine-thousand. That's about the size of San Vicente.

Then, of course, came the news about her seventeen-year-old daughter, the rebuttals of the internet rumors (of which I never heard prior to the Republicans' announcement) and the McCain campaign/RNC spinning out of control faster than the winds of Hurricane Gustav.

So I'm obviously not the biggest fan of Sarah Palin, but I have to say...I feel sorry for her regarding her family life right now.

Teen pregnancy was always a distant issue for me living in the blue states (and being male), existing only in movies and TV shows. Palin's family crisis seems to be only another story to add to Juno MacGuff's and Amy Jergens', a media-produced spectacle rather than a very real dilema.

But now, this secular, godless blue-stater is getting a little taste of the issue up close here in Argentina, with real people and not celebrities like Jamie Lynn Spears or fictional characters.

This past Sunday while walking through the park with two girls my age (17), we passed a young woman with a baby on her lap and a man standing next to her. I asked one of the girls I was with if that was the baby's mother. She responded affirmatively. I asked how old the mother was.

"Our age," she said as if that was completely normal.

OK...so I met one 17-year-old girl who's married and with a child. Not SUCH a big deal.

But as we're walking through the plaza I begin to see many more of these young families, with parents who couldn't be much older than me. I ask my new friends questions about it, and they told me that it's not uncommon for girls to get married before graduating high school.

Do they finish school? Sometimes. Sometimes not.

At one point, one of the girls I was with left us to join her twenty-seven-year-old boyfriend. The boyfriend opened the car door for her. A girl of about five was inside.

"Is that her boyfriend's daughter?" I asked the other friend. She nodded her head.

As we continued walking just the two of us, my friend explained to me that girls sometimes get married even younger than 17; it is also not uncommon for the young girls' boyfriends to leave them. She told one story of a fifteen-year-old girl in town whose boyfriend left her after she became pregnant.

And abortions aren't legal here? I asked.

She shook her head and waved her finger. "No."

Sure enough, as we're leaving the park, we spot a girl with a very rotund stomach passing by. She walked confidentally and surprisingly normally. She was not defiant like Juno or self-conscious like Amy on The Secret Life of the American Teenager. To me she seemed remarkably at ease. "Ojos," she says mockingly to my friend, the Argentine way of saying "Oo, are you dating?" It literally translates to "Eyes" or "Watch out."

"That's the pregnant girl I was talking about," my friend says.

Ojos, indeed.