Turns out the rumors of Bristol Palin giving birth to Trig weren’t true
1 September 2008
Because as it turns out, Bristol Palin, Sarah Palin’s 17-year-old daughter, is five months pregnant right now. She plans to keep the baby and marry the father.
Two thoughts:
1) Best of luck to the Palin family.
2) Interesting that Bristol’s mom supports abstinence-only education.
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6 Comments
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Bristol could ONLY be 3 months pregnany and STILL be Trig’s mother.
McCain’s campaign said she’s ‘about’ 5 months pregnant…
I’m going to go Occam’s Razor here and say that the simpler explanation is probably the true one.
Also, this is the craziest election season ever.
Yeah… that’s not what Occam’s Razor actually is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor. It actually says you should trim assumptions that aren’t material to an argument, though it’s commonly used the way you did.
That said, it’s really weird and kind of disconcerting that Palin’s way of dispelling the rumor wasn’t to, say, produce the medical records of Trig’s birth, but rather to throw her daughter under the bus.
Thanks for the clarification, Seth. I’ll Check the OR next time. (There are like 2 people in the world who got that reference.)
Agreed on producing Sarah Palin’s medical records making more sense.
But then, the BEST-case scenario on Sarah Palin and her sense of judgment is that she’s guilty of (quoting John Nail/hat tip to FiveThirtyEight.com):
1. Traveling to Dallas at 36 weeks pregnant in the first place (via plane)
2. Not going directly to a Dallas hospital once her water broke (at 4 AM) which would be standard procedure per a number of posts from doctors and newspaper articles (in fact, delivering a speech 8 hours later, and THEN catching a flight to Alaska)
3. Flying home 10-12 hours with fluid leaking risking infection and delivery in transit
4. Not telling the Airline (whose rules prohibit just this sort of thing: plus what regard did she show for the other passengers? What if they had had to make an emergency landing to save her and the baby?)
5. Bypassing the premiere area hospital – Providence, 15 minutes from the Anchorage airport (vs. over an hour to your own w/ no NICU) with an NICU to handle a 36 week preemie w/ the double risk of Downs Syndrome baby where her OB/GYN was on the staff of Dr. Johnson, a practicing OB/GYN, is an expert in child and adult sexual abuse,
6. What does this mean if anything to the situation?
7. Baby delivered in the local hospital by this “expert” even though it was supposedly 4 weeks premature and had Downs Syndrome
8. Returning to work after 3 days off after this ordeal
Again, that’s the best-case scenario, the one that assumes she was telling the truth about Trig being her baby. So she’s not a liar and a hypocrite. She’s just someone with such bad, rash judgment that she makes McCain look like Confucius.
Days Of Our Lives would laugh if someone sent them a script that tells the story of this election. They’d deem it too fantastical to be a soap opera.
Hmm… you’re easily convinced… just because Republicans, who are not denying the first rumor, are now detracting attention from the scandal by saying Bristol is “about five months” pregnant, doesn’t mean that a) this is true at all, and b) five months is accurate. Perhaps you underestimate politicians’ ability to lie and cover up scandals?
I’m awaiting the announcement of the tragic miscarriage, or the announcement that the bay is several weeks overdue (and then is born after what, in reality, is an early caesarian, to disguise a pregnancy that started AFTER the first one. If Britney can do it, so can Bristol).
And even then, do we really want a VP and potential president, who can’t even run her own family successfully? Had she taken better care of her children, and educated them about sex, and birth control (or the Republicans’ beloved abstinence), and been there for them, her daughter wouldn’t have been having sex at such a young age, and wouldn’t have been stupid enough to get knocked up (potentially twice), out of ‘wedlock’ too.
How is a bad mother like that supposed to run a country?
Thanks for the comment, and welcome to the site.
An Andrew Sullivan reader sums up my thoughts on the Bristol twice-mommed theory nicely:
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I’m not sure how to say this politely, but if Bristol Palin is more than three and a half months’ pregnant, it is physically impossible for her to have given birth on the 18th of April to Trig.
I know with “about five months” it’s difficult to be certain what they mean, which is why most doctors talk in weeks. But basically a pregnancy is calculated as 40 weeks, and is dated from the previous period so for the first two weeks of the ‘pregnancy’ one is not actually pregnant.
Women tend to take at least six weeks to start ovulating again, and often several months. Say Bristol is very young and made a medically exceptional recovery – the very very earliest she could have become pregnant ‘again’ would be from mid May, which would put her at three and a half months pregnant.
Also, and for me this is the clincher:
it’s pretty horrible down there for quite a while after giving birth, most doctors will order no sex for at least six weeks, and well let’s be honest, most men wouldn’t want to go there for at least six weeks. And most women certainly won’t be in the mood for just as long. Which means that again she is unlikely to be more than three months pregnant if she gave birth in April.
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Regarding your point on Sarah Palin being a bad mother because her teenage daughter had sex…ummm, that’d what teenagers do. It’s natural, it happens all the time. With all due respect, no point being in denial about it.
With that said, I’m right there with you on the point that the kids should have been educated about birth control (I’ve been pretty adamant about the failures of abstinence-only education on this site). I don’t know how we want to couch that, though. Sarah Palin believes abstinence-only education should be taight everywhere. That’s terribly bad, religion and denial-based ignorance and wrongheadedness, moreso than bad mothering. I *will* say that it’s possible that she portrays one side to the public (abstinence-only for all) and another to her family (teaching her kids about the importance of birth control), and that Bristol either didn’t listen, or her protection didn’t work.
As to your broader point, there are many, many reasons why Sarah Palin (or John McCain, for that matter) shouldn’t run the country. This is probably #4,712 on my list.