Sarah Palin on the Dinosaur Train?

I try best I can to get the kids to watch PBS, especially in the morning. And right before it's time to go the show "Dinosaur Train" comes on. The first time I saw the opening to this show I actually cried:

Dinosaur eggs are hatching, but there's a "different" child from a strange egg. In a nest full of winged Pteranodon chicklets is hatched an orange T-Rex.

Mrs. Pteranodon shakes her head to her "different" child: "This is your family, and I'm your mom."

The parent's guide to the show pretends that the family dynamic is about adoption. Yeah, right. Part of every show I've seen resolves in the opening minutes, the problem of how to get little "Buddy" (their T-Rex differently-chromosomed child) from one place to another given that he can't fly. Anyone who has ever strapped a child into a wheelchair...these moments are about us. (I should mention there is a Mr. Pteranodon who coaches and helps the kids with their science experiments, even though he's absent from their hatching.)

Buddy's differently-abled-ness not only includes lack of wings, he's also preternaturally obsessed with making scientific hypotheses and proving them. Don't get me started.

It's a cute and lovely family dynamic, but anyone with even a cursory knowledge of evolutionary biology knows that a real Pteranodon would kick a strange egg out of her nest, let it crash and break on the rocks below, and eat the contents before any little Buddy could be adopted and taken on science field trips. I keep silence when my daughters watch this show, that as soon as sullen teen Buddy has a growth spurt, he is going to kill and eat his own mother.

All of which brings me to the 80 percent of pregnancies in America that are "unplanned," and the 90 percent of parents who, discovering they are carrying a Down's Syndrome Baby, decide to terminate the pregnancy.

And of course Sarah Palin was trapped into making a different choice with her unplanned Down's Syndrome child, not just because of her religion, but because of her fame and desire for more of it.

She actually considered aborting her unplanned pregnancy out of town, while speaking at an Oil and Gas conference?

"There, just for a fleeting moment, I thought, I knew, nobody knows me here. Nobody would ever know. I thought, wow, it is easy. It could be easy to think maybe of trying to change the circumstances. No one would know. No one would ever know."

No wonder the really fringe anti-abortion loons don't think she's one of them. She actually figured out on her own that since the morning after pill does nothing if you're already pregnant, it can't be an abortion pill.

I also wonder with a real liberal sneer on my face whether Sarah Palin's pre-Stupak private health insurance covered an out-of-state secret abortion to "change the circumstances." "It is easy" she says...

Sure Sarah, and life is a shit sandwich.

And hey, if the out-of-state clinic doesn't take Blue Cross, Sarah Palin and bread-rich women like her can charge the "changing the circumstances" to their Oil and Gas Conference per diem. No one will ever know.

Still, I feel sorry for Sarah Palin on so many levels, not the least of which because she is blind, or at least feels the need to be publicly blind, to the needs of women who are Not Her.