What happened to the Second Gentleman's unborn child?
Why in 2014 was Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff, a reasonably good-looking 50-year-old guy who was making approaching a million dollars per year as a Century City lawyer, available to marry his 50-year old coeval Kamala Harris? (Doug and Kamala were born seven days apart in October 1964.)
Not surprisingly, it turns out that it was because Doug screwed up his first marriage to the mother of his two kids by knocking up his kids’ schoolteacher whom the Emhoffs occasionally hired as a nanny.
Of course, lots of guys have done much the same. Donald Trump, for example, is on his third wife.
Why is this relevant?
It's relevant because of the abortion issue that Kamala has chosen to run on.
Not surprisingly, while the Daily Mail emphasizes the pregnancy, the New York Times ignores it. Pregnancy raises too many interesting questions for the NYT to tolerate. Pregnancies are interesting. The NYT’s 10 million paying subscribers don’t read the NYT because it’s interesting, but because it bores them into assuming that their worldview is unquestionable.
My impression is that the median American voter finds abortion grotesque, and would like the government to derogate other people being so sloppy as to be getting abortions. On the other hand, the median voter would, now that they think about it (which they’ve been thinking about it since the Republican Supreme Court overturned Roe), like abortion to be legal just in case, God forbid, their daughter happens to get impregnated by that loser boyfriend of hers.
As movie director Todd Phillips (Hangover) suggested, isn’t it likely that Trump has paid for a lot of abortions?
On the other hand, the legalization of abortion’s impact on male behavior is a little-discussed question that might be brought to the surface in discussion of the Second Gentleman’s conundrum.
I don't know what happened to the Second Gentleman's unborn child, but it's obviously an intriguing question.
Say that the reason Emhoff was available to marry Kamala was because his kids' schoolteacher/nanny, whom he impregnated, had an abortion, so he wasn't under social pressure as a prominent attorney to marry her.
Well, you gotta admit that’s worth talking about.
Or did Emhoff's mistress give the baby up for adoption?
Or did he pony up the money for her to raise it as a single mother?
Or did he not put up the money?
All of these possibilities are highly relevant to the abortion policy question that Kamala is emphasizing.
Normally British tabloids are constrained in their reporting by notoriously strict libel laws, as well as legally enforceable restrictions on the reporting of active court cases. Because of this you often get US papers like the National Enquirer or the New York Post publishing stories of great interest to UK readers while our own papers can only print innuendo hinting to readers about what their missing.
This is a good example of the less commonly seen reverse, where a British paper (Daily Mail) has an story both interesting enough to warrant reporting and controversial enough that US media is uncomfortable relaying all details to their readers. Normally what happens with this is that a mainstream respectable publication will find an angle which makes this sort of gossip fair game to discuss, at which point a respectability cascade occurs and all outlets publish all gory details they can find. Perhaps abortion policy will be the angle that allows this.
A wag observed in the 90s that "PBS doesn't want socialism anymore, it wants America to adopt the English class system". Abortion is a great example of this, keep some loser from trying to marry above their station by aborting the brat. Honestly expect we'll get talk of a Seduction Act if abortions are ever truly restricted.