I haven’t heard a peep about the Mother/Grandmother rumor since the daughter’s pregnancy became public knowledge. So…did the leaky flight from Texas to Alaska never happen? Did she really have a baby or did she rush back to Moose Snout to be by her daughter’s side? Is there any way to find out? Can we assume that people with better investigative skills are getting the answers via Formal Documentation?
I won’t be voting for the Republicans regardless of the outcome of this story, but I’d certainly like to know if the possible VP of our country scammed the nation in order to save face. I don’t know what to think. Is she a reckless head case or is she just a quirky little gun-totin’ governor who doesn’t show when she’s pregnant?
Palin’s claim remains that she began to leak and have real contractions about 4 am and then decided to not seek local care but instead to stick around to give a keynote, go to the airport, get on an 8 hr flight to Alaska, and drive by truck to a remote location to have her baby. If her claim is true it is unconscionable. It took needless risk with her baby’s life and her own health.
It is also true that her co-workers had no idea she was pregnant at 6 months until she announced it.
It is also true that Bristol was kept out of school for over 5 months with the reason given as mono. That is an absurd length of absence for mono, one I have never seen or heard of in my 20 years of pediatric practice.
The speculation that those added up to a faked pregnancy has been somewhat discounted and overshadowed by the announcement that Bristol is currently 5 months pregnant. Of course it actually is not disproven by that fact but it is made less likely. The truth may be simply that Palin is a reckless idiot and that the child was allowed to skip school for months for no real reason.
It would be easily settled by release of medical records but Sarah Palin preferred instead to deal with it by putting her daughter on the tracks. (I guess she was otherwise going to try to keep her daughter’s pregnancy a secret?)
Also, couldn’t they be lying about how far along Bristol is right now in order to make the time jive a little better. Then she can claim a premature birth later on and everyone would believe it. The whole thing is just so bizarre. Did McCain have a stroke or something?
Maybe I’m just a genetics nerd, but don’t you people know the rate of Down syndrome in teen vs. women in their 40’s? That alone is enough to make me want to see much more evidence than we have before giving it any credence.
There’s more than enough to complain about Palin before going to complete bullshit. In fact, I’m begininng to wonder if the rumor was planted to confuse people about Bristol Palin’s true present pregnancy.
I might add that, at this point, the truth of the ‘babygate’ rumor would be the only thing that could partially justify Palin’s choices that we’ve discussed in similar threads over the weekend. If she really isn’t Trig’s mother, then she didn’t play Russian roulette with his life on April 18. And if she felt trapped in a corner on the ‘babygate’ story because there are no medical records verifying her pregnancy, it would at least explain - though not justify - her publicizing her daughter’s pregnancy to get her own self off the hook.
I’m curious, tom, why you say this is not a debate.
Sure as hell seems like a debate to me. I mean, this IS the potential Vice President we’re talking about.
Either Trig is her grandson (and she’s lying about the parentage of the kid), or Trig is her son (and she was ridiculously cavalier about that whole labor thing, almost suicidally so). Which is it- suicidal, or duplicitous?
As for her daughter now being five months pregnant… well, I don’t really think that proves anything. To me, it sounds like a clumsy attempt to cover the previous lie (if lie it was). Anything can happen between now and the delivery date- a miscarriage would be convenient, for one.
My personal theory- Bristol caught preggers, Mom tried to cover it up with the story that Trig is her own. Now, however, there’s a lot of inquiry into the story- so, quick, let’s retroactively pretend darling daughter is five-months’ knocked up, which means that she can’t possibly be Trig’s mom by about, what, one month? And then there will be that “convenient” miscarriage, after Sarah’s name has been cleared.
Either that, or Bristol IS pregnant, and was encouraged to become so, and they’re lying about the date of conception and hoping for an early birth.
I must admit, Trig having Down’s is a good indicator that Sarah is, in fact, his mother… but it’s not 100%.
Isn’t this just another Rove-style trick? Hold back the evidence until speculation is at a frenzy, then innocently release the proof. Every person who ever even wondered aloud why the campaign wouldn’t just prove it otherwise and move on is painted as an untrustworthy source. Any future evidence of a gaffe or scandle can be handwaved off as “well, they were all wrong about the first rumor, so you can’t really trust them on this, either”.
It is not a debate because it asks for actual facts, not interpretations of facts.
Did she have a baby or not? We can wrangle over what people want to believe forever (and I thought most of you had that out of your system in the six threads and 2,000 posts that we were able to flush away in the lost weekend), but there is a factual answer to that question that ought to be answered without posting another couple of thousand “Uh huh”/“Nuh uh” posts on the topic…
Did she jeopardize her life and the life of her baby by flying back to Alaska for delivery? This is a point that can be debated (although we’re still pretty short on facts, here), but that specific question is not even in the OP.
Menocchio yeah I certainly do. I also know that given a child with Down’s syndrome the odds are more likely that the parent is under 30 than over 30.
Tom I know that you somehow have had a hard time understanding how absurd it is to believe that a doctor would approve of traveling in labor with premature rupture of membranes, and how insane of a choice that was if it was made. You several times tried to poo-poo the leak as not the same a a bag break and that the statements made by people like me about this absurdity were exaggerations. They are not.
The story as she tells it is odd beyond belief. Many things do not fit to any one with any medical knowledge. I hope that I have been around here long enough and have posted rationally enough that you can recognize that I would not make a claim about something medical without being quite sure of it. This is very bizarre. It is almost equally bizarre to keep a kid out with mono that long.
Now bizarre does not equal faked pregnancy. But it becomes even more bizarre to have kept the daughter’s current pregnancy literally under wraps (with a baby on top of those wraps) even after his choice of her was announced, and to only reveal it in response to “internet rumors.” It is bizarre to not answer the rumors directly with a release of medical records.
Bizarre occurrences having to do with someone trying out to be a heartbeat away from being President deserve explanation. Until they are explained speculation is warranted.
I’ll even make that a proposition: speculation about Sarah Palin’s bizarre decision vis-avis travel in labor with PROM is warranted; any bizarre decisions made by someone in line to be President are worthy of vetting completely.
Does that make it enough of a debate for you? Please defend why they should not be.
Not all breakage of water happens in a “all at once” type event. When our first child was born my wife was “leaking” for 24 hours before they finally induced labor.
While this story does not outline everyday events, it does not paint an inconceivable picture. It could be that due to her prior knowledge of the baby’s condition, she just wanted to get back to her own doctor. To be honest, I haven’t paid that much attention - did she have a healthcare advisor with her on the trip/flight? Even if not, with this being her 5th child, she had a pretty good idea of how her body had reacted in the past.
I fail to see an issue worthy of all this hand wringing.
Presumably she was under the care of a medical professional, and it wasn’t a high risk pregnancy. DSeid is right here. There is something mighty fish about her water breaking story. Of course there’s no proof of anything here, but it’s definitely making me go: :dubious:
The questions I raised about the difference between water breaking and fluid leaking were genuine questions based on conflicting reports on Saturday that I have not repeated since I got an independent opinion of the issue. I have not "poo-poo"ed anything.
That issue was not raised in the OP and I did not see anything to debate in the OP. (I’d have shipped it to GQ except that there are so many hostile political voices on the SDMB at the moment that it would have simply come flying back here.)
Why should I “defend” a position I have not taken? The OP did not raise that issue. Without that issue, there was no debate. If you now wish to debate it in this thread, go ahead.* However, it is this overwhelming need on the part of the extreme partisans of both camps to pick fights that I find tiresome. There are a dozen or so of you that look for fights (or demand that positions not taken be defended) where they are unnecessary.
I would ask that you actually wait until someone takes an oppositional stand before we fill up one more thread with one-sided rants against the perfidy of one’s political opponents.
Er…this is what her actual story about the flight in question is:
(full story here: http://www.thebulletin.us/site/index.cfm?newsid=19674235&BRD=2737&PAG=461&dept_id=576361&rfi=8 )
I think it became embellished into a story about flying while in labor by those who view her as being an awesomely tough bad-ass.
The truth is that her doctor evidently gave her the okay to do what she did, so maybe we can dial back some of the hyperbole about her flight being “suicidal”? (Are you aware that for many centuries women gave birth at home without any doctors present at all? Is anyone who chooses a homebirth, waterbirth, or other non-medical form of birth a suicidal nut in your world?)
We really need an expose on how Obama’s raising his kids. How fast did Michelle get to the hospital when she was in labor!!! Were they breastfed!!! Have they ever been subjected to the germ farm that is known as daycare!!! O NOES!!! :o
It’s all soooo easy when you just stop to figure it out. I know y’all’s original conspiracy theory was shot down by Bristol being five months preggers, but not to worry…
Trig, the downs boy born four months ago, is not the future VP’s child. His mom is Willow, the 13 year old daughter. Sarah is faking on that one to save face for the family. Bristol was held out of school as a red herring for this deal.
Bristol is, indeed, now five months pregnant. Her dad got in her pants while she was playing hooky from school. DNA tests would be certain to bear this out, but Sarah won’t allow the tests.
Just for good measure, Sarah’s youngest daughter, Piper, born in 2001, was sired by Dubya. DNA tests would prove this too, but Sarah is, once again, refusing to allow the tests to be run.
Buried in the now deleted threads, but findable if you insist, is links to contemporary reports in which she says that contractions (paraphrasing but pretty close) “different than the ‘false labor’ she’d been having” began at about 4am. Statistically the time course from those early contractions to delivery is 10 - 20 hours for first timers and generally (although not always) faster with additional pregnancies. PROM (premature rupture of the membranes) further speeds it up and is a major infection risk to the child. So it is interesting that she is quoted as saying different things at different times. In one report she was quoted saying that she had her doctors permission but her doctor denies having said it was okay to do it - although she also claims that she doesn’t think doing it was doing anything wrong - which is something that I can tell you no OB would agree with. I think that anyone who knows that are statistically likely to deliver in the next several hours would be insane to place themselves out of reach of expert care. A home birth involves a trained midwife and generally follows strict guidelines about having hospital back up available for potential complications. To compare that birthing circumstance with being in airplane en route to Alaska with just you, Dad, and flight attendants present to handle whatever situation might occur is absurd.
John, I maintain my proposition: the circumstances as described by her are bizarre and if true evince a reckless person; a person who is in line to possibly take over the Presidency must have any bizarre bits that we know about explored. I do not know what the actual facts are. Again, I am open to the explanation that she really is just that stupid and reckless but I am also open to other explanations. Should bizarre bits of the past in individuals going up for this sort of job be ignored in your opinion?