The Palin Family Circus

The Week discusses Andrew Sullivan's persistence on the questions surrounding the birth of Trig Palin, Sarah Palin's Down's Syndrome son with an excerpt from Sullivan's recent blog posting:

"The way in which Palin... has relentlessly exploited her story and child makes this an even more salient political issue - and one which deserves appropriate press scrutiny, as with any other core campaign platform.

"...I have never claimed I know the truth. I don't. I only know that none of us does. We all have to rely on the word of Sarah Palin — something about as reliable as a credit default swap. I want to know the truth. Because if I am loony, I deserve the pushback and criticism for suspecting a story that turned out to be true. And because if Palin has lied about this, it's the most staggering, appalling deception in the history of American politics."

I have to confess in the first 48 hours after John McCain selected Palin to be his running mate in 2008, I spent that Labor Day weekend obsessively poring over the speculation that flooded the internet and blogosphere concerning the story Palin told of Trig's birth, and the doubts raised about whether the child was even hers. I agree completely with Sullivan's point that Palin has used her youngest child as a prop and as a political lever when it comes to the far Right. My own interest, however, had to do with what Palin's version of the story told me about her as a mother.

I have never met a woman who has not wanted to talk about her pregnancy and the experience of giving birth. People's childbirth stories are like people's dreams - they are rarely interesting to anyone else, but for women, childbirth is a profound experience and since we typically lack the words to accurately describe that life-changing experience, we settle on the exhaustive, and often boring, details of the experience. What I find so striking about Palin's story was how devoid it was of those details, and the details she did provide painted her as rather cavalier about a pregnancy involving a baby that she knew would be born with Down's Syndrome. I've never met a woman that didn't paint herself in the most heroic light when recounting her childbirth tale. Palin's story is striking because it sounds like it was no big deal. It was no big deal she traveled to Texas late into her high-risk pregnancy, it was no big deal she concealed her pregnancy until the seventh month, it was no big deal she flew back to Alaska while she was in labor, and it was no big deal that once in Alaska, she drove all the way to Wasilla to give birth.

Most of the speculation and conspiracy theories that abound on the internet question whether or not Palin is actually the baby's mother. My own conclusion after reading Palin's versions of the story is that Sarah Palin's audience for her birth story isn't other women. It's men. Palin talks about childbirth as I imagine a man would. It's all business, cut and dried. No big deal. She's back at work the next day. It's her fifth child - she's a pro at this and can handle it. Palin is also very aware that her looks and her sex appeal account for much of her popularity and success as a politician. And so while having a large family is a political asset for a Republican woman candidate, reminding men that she has actually gone through pregnancy and childbirth five times diminishes her "babe-ness" considerably.

What is disturbing about the story of Trig's birth is that Palin's ambition and quest for power supercedes the wrenching maternal drives that motivate the majority of women. While it would be shocking to learn that the baby is not really hers, what is more horrifying is that her ambition led her to make a series of decisions that put her child in serious danger. While some find the story to be not credible, I find it to be in keeping with a personality that is deeply narcissitic.