Is Palin Covering Up Her Daughter's First Pregnancy?

So have a look at the picture above of the Palin family children. The girl on the right is Sarah Palin's 17-year-old daughter, Bristol, holding Trig, the baby born in April with Down Syndrome.

Trig is supposedly Bristol's youngest sibling. But the rumors have it that Trig is not Sarah's son ... he's Bristol's.

It's these rumors that prompted the family to come clean about another potential scandal: Bristol is pregnant (again?). McCain's camp claim that they knew about the pregnancy when they vetted Palin and are okay with it. Well, sure, if it seals the campaign's pro-life stance, why not?

So here's the deal:

March 2008: Palin announces she's seven months pregnant, although no one, not even her aides, had noticed anything different about her. She looked as trim as ever and even modeled for Vogue during her supposed pregnancy. This article emphasizes that she doesn't look pregnant (perhaps they suspected something) over and over again.

April 2008: Palin is in Texas delivering a speech when she supposedly starts leaking amniotic fluid. She finishes her speech, boards a plane, flies from Texas to Alaska, and then gives birth, at the age of 44, to a Down Syndrome child, a month early. Yeah, I don't believe it either.

August 2008: After her candidacy is announced, rumors that Trig is Bristol's kid surface immediately. To quash the rumors, Palin announces Bristol's current pregnancy, saying that she's five months along. Now let's do the math. Trig is born on April 18 or 19. Even if Bristol got pregnant the very next day, she'd still be only a little over four months along. Right?

Except ... suppose this is all a lie. What if Trig really wasn't Palin's baby? It would make sense then to withold the information until the last possible minute, so that people wouldn't be obsessing over Palin's lack of a baby bump. Especially if Bristol didn't tell her parents about the baby until very late and they couldn't make other arrangements. In fact, six pounds is a low birthweight for a full-term baby, but not unreasonable if a 16/17 year old didn't tell her parents she was pregnant and wasn't taking care of herself. What if the baby didn't come early, but they planned to let on that he did, so that the scrutiny of Palin's baby bump--and of her family--would be minimal?

And what if, now, they've exaggerated the progress of Bristol's pregnancy and plan to claim that her current pregnancy ends early, too? She could conceivably (get it? conceivably?) be three months pregnant, or even four.

So why all of this? Well--this is pure speculation, and everything could be exactly as the Palins say it is--but suppose Bristol is an angry young woman. She's 16, she's been ignored by her political animal mother pretty much since birth (Bristol would have been born around 1991 or 92, right when her mother was ascending to her first city council job), and all she wants to do is get her parents' attention, get back at them for putting her mother's political career first.

So she finds a boyfriend and deliberately gets pregnant ... or accidentally on purpose gets pregnant. But then her nerve fails her--or else this is part of her plan--and she doesn't tell her folks until it's really really too late.

Unfortunately for Bristol, a governor (that's a winner of elections to you) knows how to turn such things to advantage and, knowing that the McCain camp is sniffing around, Palin realizes that having a baby right now will raise her value through the roof. Upon pain of death Bristol is sworn to secrecy (or maybe she goes along with it, hatching a new plan) and they keep the swollen Bristol out of the limelight (how do they do this? Who knows? There are no pictures of her or articles about her at this time. Did they keep her home from school?)

Bristol's revenge is to get knocked up again right away. Now they have to let her have it herself. How will this play out?

Well, even if none of my little speculative fiction is true, let's think about the kind of family it is, in which a 17-year-old girl gets pregnant while her mother is being vetted for the office of vice president. This is clearly not a girl who gives a shit about her mother's political career. This is clearly a girl with an issue. This is clearly not a girl who is affected by her parents' born-again abstinence thang. This is clearly not a girl whose parents are watching her very closely. Wonder why the media isn't focusing on that.

ETA: Okay, most of the media reporting on this didn't mention which bloggers were circulating the rumors, but I finally found out that it's the Daily Kos. They did the same speculation job I did but did a much more thorough job. Turns out, Bristol was removed from school for 5-8 months for mononucleosis. Right.