Saletan, while that statement may be correct based on your statistically questionable premise, it ignores the "why" of it all.

Laud her for not "getting rid of her mess" and you might be inadvertently hitting on why she didn't--for the praise of people who value such things and for their vote. And which act is more despicable, getting rid of her mess, or, parlaying such a "hardship" into praise and (more importantly) votes for not covering it up. And here I thought Rove was a clever bastard...

This is sort of off on a tangent, but...

The reason that I say that the statistical analysis are questionable (since I don't want to be viewed as just sharp shooting, without anything behind my claim) is that it presumes some sort of reset each year of these women. To me, each of the 37 can only be considered once while in their age group, not per year as Saletan suggests.

If your unintended pregnancy rate in 18-29 year olds is 6-7%, then, it's 6-7% for an entire sample. Since these ladies were not all 18-29 at the same time, their population is really only represented by two or three at any given time. So, in any given year, you have only two or three women in this presidential/vice presidential sample at the correct age. As such, any one represents as much as 50% of the small sample size and so not becoming pregnant is not surprising at all, nor is it at odds with the data.

I'm not saying that there weren't pregnancies, just saying that the sample is too small, especially at any given time, to be considered representative.