Sarah Palin's Wild Ride

Lately there seems to be renewed interest the rumors about Gov. Sarah Palin's fifth pregnancy and the birth of her son, Trig. These rumors started long ago in Alaska, before Palin even announced her pregnancy, and made it onto the national scene along with Palin during the RNC. For awhile they seemed to die down, but they are once again aggressively gaining attention. I myself did not have any inkling of the rumors until my sister told me, and even then I didn't think much of it until one day, bored and wishing to avoid the mound of housework that had piled up, I started researching Palin's last pregnancy on my own. When I began to really understand Palin's actions during and after her pregnancy, and her account of the labor and birth, it struck me as to how surreal it all seemed. Let's break it down:

In March 2008, Sarah Palin announced to her staff that she was seven months pregnant. No one, not a single person who had been working with her on a daily basis during this time, not even her immediate family, had had any suspicion that she was expecting. Palin attributed her invisible pregnancy to the fact that she was in good shape and "just didn't show." It's true that some women stay small throughout most of their pregnancies and don't "show" until the very end. However, there is a photo of Palin during her first pregnancy in which she was as big as a house. In most cases, a woman will show MORE and gain more weight with each successive pregnancy, and this is particularly true of women over the age of forty (Sarah was 44 at the time). Photos of her during this time show no conclusive evidence that she was or was not pregnant.

In Mid-April, Palin was set to give a speech at a convention in Dallas, Texas. According to Sarah Palin's own account, at 4 am on April 17 she began leaking amniotic fluid. That was "one of the signs" that led her to believe that the baby would be born soon. She was not due for another five weeks, and had found out during the pregnancy that the baby had Down's Syndrome. I am not clear on the exact figures, but a percentage of Down's babies are born with heart defects and need emergency treatment at birth. Palin called her doctor in Alaska, who gave her the go-ahead to continue her day as planned. Around noon Palin gave her speech, then skipped the rest of the convention activities to take a flight back home to Alaska. According to current airline records, the Palins (Sarah and her husband, Todd) would have taken two flights, approximately four hours each, with a one- or two-hour layover in Seattle. The flight attendants would later claim that "the stage of her pregnancy was not obvious." Upon landing in Anchorage, the Palins passed up that city's large hospital in favor of a regional hospital in Palmer, AK, about an hour's drive, to deliver the baby. The hospital was not equipped with NICU facilities. Sarah was induced, and Trig was born at 6:30 am on April 18.

Sounds straightforward enough, right? But let's take a closer look. Many people, men in particular, and also women of an older generation who were discouraged from learning about or even experiencing their own babies' births, may not have a great understanding of labor and childbirth. Birth is not a clean process. Nor is it at all predictable. Even if labor does not seem to be progressing, there is no way of knowing when things may suddenly pick up. When the membranes rupture and amniotic fluid is expelled (when a woman says her "water broke"), it is quite messy. Even a small leak towards the top of the amniotic sack (the "bag" in which the baby sits) will cause the amniotic fluid to trickle out consistently. Even with the use of sterile padding, caution has to be exercised to make sure the area is kept as dry and clean as possible to prevent infection. How could a woman who has already been leaking fluid for several hours get dressed and give a speech in front of a crowd of people? How can this same woman sit on a plane for hours, and show absolutely no signs to the flight attendants, who are trained to observe medical emergencies, that she was in labor? How can she bypass a big hospital in favor of a tiny hospital an hour away? How is it that this woman has not yet given birth, seeing as how each successive labor is typically (though not always) shorter than the last and this woman has boasted about her "easy labors" in the past? How can this woman's doctor think this kind of behavior is okay, without even checking her patient to see how the labor is progressing?

Palin returned to work three days after Trig was born, and brought the baby with her. Never mind the question of why the hospital would release a premature Down's baby who needed treatment for jaundice after only a couple days; how could a woman be back to work as usual three days after giving birth? The first few days, weeks even, postpartum are uncomfortable to say the least. The mother is sore. She is tired, she is bleeding heavily. She is adjusting physically and mentally to her new body. I have never met a brand new mother who could think of doing anything other than lie in bed and bond with her baby.

After learning all of this information, I can say with 100% certainty that this scenario DID NOT HAPPEN. Biologically, it is nearly impossible. Even on the remote chance that it is all true, it proves that Palin acted with unbelievable recklessness and irresponsibility and put the life of her unborn child at risk (not a very nice thing for a staunch pro-lifer to do).

So, why would she fake a pregnancy? That is a matter of debate. I have heard many theories, from the plausible (to hide the pregnancy of one of her unwed teen daughters, most likely Bristol, but Willow's name has also been thrown around), to the bizarre (she adopted a Down's baby and passed it off as her own and concocted the story of choosing to have the baby anyway to appeal to the pro-life Right), to the downright ridiculous (the baby is that of the Palins' son Track and Bristol's boyfriend's mother, and to keep it quiet they shipped Track off to military school and claimed the baby was their own). Who knows?

Another question would be, why is this important? It is important because Sarah Palin nearly became Vice President of the United States, with a chance at becoming President, and is likely gearing up for a run in 2012. It is important because she wants abstinence-only sex education to be taught in schools. We have already been told that Bristol has had a baby, and if Trig is actually Bristol's (or even Willow's) first child, it would be another glaring example of why preventing teens from learning about birth control is a bad thing. It is important because a large part of Palin's public persona is her "hockey mom," pro-family image. All Palin would have to do to clear up these rumors is to release SOME form of proof that she gave birth to Trig, yet she has not done it. Her way of "proving" that she was Trig's mother was to throw her poor daughter Bristol under the bus and announce to the world in a very public way that Bristol couldn't have been Trig's mother because she was already pregnant when he was born. Is that really all she's got?