Sarah Palin’s emergence does have the left scrambling to make sense of their world, so much so that some screeding left coasters have entirely tilted their logic into incomprehensibility.

Case in point, Judith Lewis (she of LA Weekly and certainly nee leftist screed), posted The Luxury of True Reproductive Choice in the Mother, er, Jones (that smart, fearless falling off the left edge ‘zine) last week.

Ms. Lewis makes sure to discuss the topics do jour, making sure to interject how agonizing it must have been for Palin and her daughter to choose to go through with their pregnancies (Certainly you would agonize Ms. Lewis. The Palins? Don’t think so.)

Begrudgingly, Lewis admits admiration at the lack of hypocrisy on the Palin’s part, while making sure to cycle the criticisms that “some say” (oh, but you wouldn’t say would you Ms. Lewis?)

But – now get this – what we really need to understand is that the Palins are the fortunate kind of people that can actually exercise reproductive choice – because they can afford to. They can afford to choose to have their children and not abort them. That’s right, the right to choose is a matter of socioeconomic status. All the disaffected women in our country really don’t have the right to choose – they must have an abortion!

Why? Well, according to Lewis, certainly because Republicans don’t want to support disaffected mothers (including teens). If Palin has her way, she’ll make abortion illegal and then refuse to support the disaffected poor. Lewis just can’t help herself from finally introducing one of last week’s Palin smears:

Paradoxically, kindness toward mothers and children in need—in the form of food, shelter, and education—is not a value the party she belongs to, including that energized base, upholds. Just this year, Palin used her gubernatorial power to reduce funding to Convenant [sic] House Alaska’s Passage House, a program that “assists young mothers in developing skills such as healthy parenting, money management, priority setting, housing acquisition and social skills development.” 

This claim has, of course, been well fisked for the smear that it is, but the bald assertion in this context does bring up an interesting point. Does Ms. Lewis actually support a Christian organization that provides the ability to choose not to abort specifically to homeless pregnant teenagers? Now, now, Ms. Lewis, Planned Parenthood is going to strip you of your pro-choice creds.

So what can we draw from this, er, piece of smart, fearless journalism? That 90% of Down Syndrome pregnancies happen to the disaffected poor who can’t choose to let those children come to term? That of the roughly four million children that are born in the US each year, about 300,000 of them must be aborted because their mothers can’t afford to have them – only women who have sufficient economic wherewithal actually have reproductive choice – the great society experiment of the last forty years, with all of its increasing entitlement programs, is insufficient to keep the poor from aborting their babies? That the more financially secure a woman is the less likely she is to choose an abortion? That faith based organizations should have unfettered support for assisting young mothers? And that, given that the entitlement system is insufficient, there must be government guaranteed health care so that women can actually choose to have their children instead of kill them?

That looks like a pretty tight corner there, Ms. Lewis.

Cross posted from Pull On Superman’s Cape.