The Initiation of Sarah

Evidently, women’s studies types have found at least one woman they may not want to study, at least as a role model.

“When a woman is pregnant, she is so intimately connected with her baby and yet so ignorant about the baby’s progress without a doctor or midwife to give her information,” Cornell Law School professor Sherry Colb wrote in a post that appeared on the school’s community site of the Republican vice-presidential candidate’s Down’s syndrome test during her last pregnancy. “An amniocentesis provides information in an otherwise frustratingly opaque setting.”

“I do, however, fault Sarah Palin for wanting to deprive American women of a choice that she herself had and that she apparently thought about making.” No it doesn’t.
Women the Alaska governor’s age are routinely given this test by obstetricians.
They recommend it.

“In January 2007, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists came up with new recommendations for Down syndrome screening, departing from the long-held position of only screening ‘high risk’ women 35 or older to recommending that all pregnant women should be screened, regardless of age,” Penny Starr reported on the Cybercast News Service. Starr also recaptured Professor Colb’s web site comments.

Earlier his year, the law professor penned an article on FindLaw.com on one of Barack Obama’s most controversial votes in the Illinois state senate that stirred up some controversy as well. “The only problem with Colb’s attempt to clear Obama of his pro-infanticide position is she referenced the wrong bill,” anti-abortion activist Jill Stanek pointed out on August 15 about a column by the professor that appeared two days earlier. “I couldn’t believe it….”

“Colb linked to ‘a 2002 proposed law entitled the “Illinois Induced Birth Infant Liability Act,” Senate Bill 1661.’ But the correct comparison to the federal Born Alive Infants Protection Act would be Senate Bill 1662, ‘Born-Alive Infant Defined.’”

“No wonder the bills didn’t match up,” Stanek writes. “Couldn’t have been purposeful misrepresentation, could it?” That’s a good question.

As it happens, Colb posted a correction to the column that appeared on the day of Stanek’s critique. “It has been pointed out to me that at least some of the controversy surrounding Senator Obama’s position as a state legislator stems from his opposition to an Illinois bill that much more closely resembled the federal Born Alive Infants Protection Act than did the bill that I discussed in my column (and which Obama also opposed and was also criticized for opposing, in similar terms),” Colb wrote. “To the extent that one criticizes Obama for this opposition, as the National Right to Life Committee does here, my column does not directly address that critique.”

“Rather than explore in detail what might have led Senator Obama to oppose this other bill, I refer readers to The Huffington Post discussion of this issue.” For its part HuffPo confines itself to an attack on Catholic activist Deal Hudson with a quote from an Illinois pro-choice Republican thrown in for window dressing.

By the way, Colb, previously at Rutgers where she taught feminist legal studies, might use commentary such as her previously quoted pieces as texts in class. “BE WARNED,” an anonymous reviewer wrote on ratemyprofessor.com in capital letters. “Although her Final is multiple choice & T/F, she DOES ask questions about the handouts (i.e., her own published articles).”

(Incidentally, Colb received her Juris Doctorate from Harvard in 1991, the same year in which Barack Obama graduated from its law school.)

Small wonder then that, with professors such as Colb, many college students who have flocked to the Obama campaign are misinformed about where their candidate stands on the most radical form of abortion. One-third of the collegiates surveyed in a poll by Students for Life of America think that Barack Obama wants to ban partial-birth abortion.

In the meantime, don’t look for the attacks upon the Alaska governor from the Ivory Tower to let up anytime soon. As of this writing, googling the phrase Professors Against Sarah Palin nets 2,750,000 results while Professors For Sarah Palin produces 346,000 entries.

Professors on most campuses donated overwhelmingly to the Obama campaign.

“History professor Adele Alexander, who donated $2,300 to Obama in the primaries and continues to donate to his general election campaign, previously told The Hatchet she met Obama while he was teaching at the University of Chicago in the early 1990s,” Bryan Han wrote in the George Washington University student newspaper on September 4. “She said she and her family donated to Obama because they are ‘convinced of Obama’s integrity, vision and inspirational ability to lead the country and wanted to support his candidacy.’”

Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.

Malcolm A. Kline
Malcolm A. Kline is the Executive Director of Accuracy in Academia. If you would like to comment on this article, e-mail contact@academia.org.