IN AN INTERVIEW in the latest issue of Harper’s Bazaar, Bristol Palin makes single motherhood look great. A baby is extra work, but doesn’t interfere with a woman’s independence. A few decades ago, popular culture celebrated the single young career girl, the Mary Tyler Moore or Marlo Thomas who got her own apartment presumably before getting married and settling down. Now that popular figure has a baby too. Bristol Palin is inspirational, not for abstinence but for the single woman who wants, or is compelled, to raise her baby herself.

Elisa Lipsky-Karasz writes:

… Bristol is hardly unhappy, despite her hectic schedule and lack of sleep. “I love my baby more than anything,” she says, which is obvious from the cuddles he gets. “He’s like a Gerber baby. He’s the cutest baby in the whole world.”

She’s also fiercely proud of her newly purchased condo. (Before she bought it, she and Tripp were living at home in Wasilla, an hour and a half away.) Though her mother’s earnings have been widely reported at $12 million since she stepped down as governor last July, largely due to her book, Going Rogue, and her TV deals, it’s Bristol who has picked out and paid for everything: the big leather couches, the flat-screen TVs, Tripp’s toddler-size bed (though he sleeps with his mother), and the Subaru wagon in the garage. “I’m on my own,” she says, in between constant texting on her BlackBerry. “I’m really proud of it. I’m a hard worker.”

                                   — Comments —

Brittany writes:

We all can understand that Bristol loves her baby and of course there is nothing wrong with that but she needs to stop glorifying single motherhood. She needs to understand that the average young mother struggles a lot more than she does. Stop using your baby for publicity and for advocating feminism.

Thomas F. Bertonneau writes:

I agree with Brittany that the glorification of teenage single-motherhood is perverse and destructive (because adolescent out-of-wedlock mothers are a social disaster). The pathetic aspect of the Bristol Palin story seems to me, however, not to lie in any decision that Bristol has made. Bristol is a high-school girl who was not sufficiently savvy, or sufficiently morally self-controlled, to say no to the creepy Lothario who seduced and impregnated her; she is not intelligent enough to have thought up the lucrative “career” that has now been settled on her by publicists and marketers. First the creepy Lothario exploited Bristol. Now – must one say it in explicit terms, but I think so – people who work for Bristol’s mother are exploiting her. This slick, ultra-public exploitation implies, moreover, that the advocates of teenage single-motherhood, and everything that goes with it and provides it with a context, hold the power of final influence even over the supposed representatives of a supposed non-liberal ethos, like Sarah Palin. During the 2008 presidential election campaign, I vocally defended Sarah Palin against what I perceived to be the knee-jerk smears made against her by my liberal professorial colleagues. (Try doing that on a college campus.) I now feel something like a fool. Palin would have responded in an authentically moral way to her daughter’s indiscretion by insisting that Bristol keep things private, put the baby first, finish high school, and continue her education so as to make herself eligible for a real job. Instead, by spreading around the perquisites of her own notoriety, she is teaching her daughter and all those who are like her daughter the opposite of the lesson that they ought to learn. Of course, that is what Brittany is saying and I am not trying to contradict her.

Laura writes:

I agree that the most pathetic aspect of this story is not in what Bristol has done, although I don’t think Bristol is less culpable than Levi. They were high school students who shouldn’t have been given the time alone together. There was some very serious laissez faire parenting going on here. Even in the best of all worlds, these things happen, but Sarah Palin should have declined the vice presidency for the time being, until her daughter’s life was in order, not just for Bristol’s sake but because of the example she would set. It’s likely the whole matter would have turned out differently without all the attention. Bristol’s child could even have been melded into the Palin family, which still includes young children, allowing Bristol to go on to start adulthood in a more normal way.

I also don’t blame Bristol for the fun she is having now. She’s a teenager and it would take unusual character to resist the money and attention she is receiving. It’s up to her parents to direct her life.

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