Palin Has Chosen to Exploit Her Own Daughter's Pregnancy

Is Sarah Palin ready to take the mantle of worst mother of the year from Lynne Spears? Has Todd Palin wrestled the title of worst father from Billy Ray Cyrus?

Sarah Palin may be running for Vice President but is she any different from the woman who sold the story of her daughter Jamie Lynn's pregnancy to a magazine for $1 million, or from the father that allowed 15-year-old Miley Cyrus to be photographed semi-nude for Vanity Fair supposedly to further her career?

Despite her supposed "Family Values" credentials, she and her husband Todd are being just as exploitative of her teenage daughter, Bristol, as any of these celebrity parents have been. Actually, even more so.

Like Elizabeth and John Edwards, they knew they had a ticking time bomb of a family secret, that they were hiding from the public, when they stepped into the limelight of the Presidential race. But the Edwards were adults and were aware or should have been, that the primary public fallout of their decision not to reveal John Edwards' affair would fall on themselves. They would bear the shame of their decision to deceive the American public about their family crisis. Their children would be off limits.

Not so in the case of the Palins. They took center stage with the full knowledge that their 17-year-old's five-months-along pregnancy was about to become front page news around the world. Bristol Palin hasn't been the star of a major kids TV show like Jamie Lynn or Miley Cyrus. She has not chosen a life of celebrity. But now, thanks to her mother's decision to accept the Republican Vice Presidential candidacy, her private life -- her sex life -- is as exposed as if she had long been a cover regular on Star or US Weekly.

She has unwittingly and literally become the poster child for her mother's anti-choice and abstinence-only education policies.

Having been the editor-in-chief of teen magazine YM for five years, and now as the mother of a 17-year-old girl myself, there are a few things I know. Seventeen year-old girls are not yet adults, they are highly emotional human beings who are still trying to find their own identities and to establish self-confidence. They are easily embarrassed, they care tremendously what their friends think, and their relationships with guys are always on a dramatic rollercoaster. They are not ready to get married, raise babies or to deal with public embarrassment and humiliation. Haven't endless teen movies and TV shows from "Sixteen Candles" to "Gossip Girl" all dealt with these issues of lack of confidence, fear of embarrassment and befuddlement with dealing with the opposite sex?

No wonder getting pregnant in high school is truly a girl's worst nightmare, points out Atoosa Rubenstein, the founding editor-in-chief of CosmoGIRL! magazine, and later the editor of Seventeen magazine. Bristol Palin should have "the protection of her mother right now and not be paraded around as a platform. She should have had the privacy to make her own difficult choices and now she has to support her mother's ambitions and policies regardless of what she wants for herself -- she's been thrown under a bus," believes Rubenstein.

"She probably feels powerless right now," points out Gloria Feldt, who is the author of Behind Every Choice is a Story, and is the former president of Planned Parenthood of America. "Because of her family's attitude she probably doesn't feel that she has a choice, in terms of what will happen to her and her mother is weaving a narrative that it's a heroic thing of course that she is going forward with the pregnancy, she's getting married and it will all be beautiful and rosy."

But Bristol Palin isn't a policy poster child, or a celebrity, she's a real live 17-year-old trying to cover her growing bump with a baggy sweatshirt or by holding her 4 month-old baby brother as a shield. She's now planning, according to her mom's statement, to marry and spend her life with her 18-year-old boyfriend, Levi Johnston, a guy who uses the "f" word as his major descriptive adjective on his MySpace page. He also until yesterday described himself as someone who "likes to hang out with the boys…and just f---in chillin," and who doesn't want kids on that same page, until it was yanked off of public view.