Why I am drinking the Kool Aid re: conspiracy theories about Sarah Palin's 5th kid

[drucat]

I posted this as a reply in another LJ, but I might as well out myself as being completely nuts here and explain why I believe that either Sarah Palin's 5th kid Trig is actually her older daughter Bristol's first child, or there is some huge piece of information that we are not getting, which might be as simple as that Palin is completely

Comments

[gerardomacphail]

gah i also have been thinking about all of this.
normally i wouldnt care less, but it seems so obvious and so fucked up.
and if her daughter IS pregnant now? what the hell? And if she isnt, and they are saying she is...whose baby are they taking to cover up this time?
im so conufsed and so sickened

[drucat]

I think Bristol must be pregnant, but if she got pregnant within a month of Trig's being born (and he wasn't a month premature?), then she's not as pregnant as they're claiming... but if she fails to produce a kid at the right time, by then it will be too late to fuck with anything politically (post-election) and they will probably just make some kind of weak excuse about miscalculating the due date or the kid being overdue or something

[gerardomacphail]

gosh i dont know

[drucat]

To be completely fair, since she was governor, she was able to do things like keep a crib in her office, etc - flexibility that most mother's who want to be able to work don't have - and the dad stays with the kids full time, so I don't think they're missing out really. Of course, she doesn't have any policies that would help out mothers who want to be able to have children and a career but *don't* have the extraordinary flexibility that she does, so that's irritating as well

[livejay]

your statistics logic in the beginning is flawed... you are trying to apply population statistics to an individual. to put it another way, Bristol's incidence of pregnancy is not higher than her mother's, though people at Bristol's age have a far higher incidence of pregnancy than people at Sarah's age. sarah palin is far more likely to have a down's baby at her age than bristol palin is, regardless of population statistics (which i am unfamiliar with in any event).

at maternal age 45, risk is 1:30, as opposed to bristol's age, where it is well under 1:1500. Now, if Bristol had 50 babies, the chance of her having a down's baby would equal that of her mother's.

[drucat]

Right, but if we *didn't know* if either of them was pregnant, the chances would be greater for it to be Bristol. Which balances out the chances that the baby in question has Down's. You seem to have misunderstood me, but yes, I do understand that.

[livejay]

i think what you're trying to say is that given baby x with down's syndrome, baby x's mother is more likely (on a population basis) to be younger than older, which is true. however, the reverse, which i believe is your claim, is not true. in a specific instance, given a baby with down's syndrome and two possible mothers, mother 45 and mother 16, the more likely mother is the older one.

[drucat]

That's not what I'm saying at all, and since you obviously didn't understand in the first place, it's not totally clear why you keep explaining things that I'm already fully aware of. The reason that part was in there was because, as I said, this post was a response I typed out to someone, and they brought up the Down's as though it were evidence that the kid was Sarah Palin's, which it in fact it is not, since applying statistics like that to an individual gets absurd and doesn't actually prove anything. I simply was trying to point out to her that, if you have two people and you don't know which of them is pregnant, Bristol is statistically more likely given her age, so it's just as meaningful to say that as it is to say that Sarah is more likely to have a kid with Down's Syndrome.

[canis_ridens]

When I was an EMT, we were told that, for childbirth calls, if it was the first child, it was highly unlikely that we would have to deliver it ourselves, but, if the woman had already had a few kids, that we would likely have to deliver. Supposedly, the bones need to be pushed apart with the first one, but typically don't return to their original shape, making childbirth easier and easier each time. While I'm never going to find out for myself, anecdotally, this seems a common observation; I thus find it quite unlikely that Sarah Palin gave birth to Trig. That's a heck of a long labor for someone who has already had a couple of kids.

[drucat]

Yeah, I've seen a bunch of people saying that, too. I have no idea what the timing is like, but it seems like she was pretty damn sure it was going to take 14 hours since she didn't just go to the damn hospital in Texas like a normal person.

[lilsabub]

My mom's water broke at like 11pm, but she didn't go into labor. Apparently this posed a threat to my life because I needed to get out soon lest I suffocated from lack of amneotic fluid to breathe. It did take about 14 hours for me to come out (I was upside-down. Stubborn as always.), but mom went to the hospital immediately after the water broke (as a sane person might).
Also, as to why Palin would choose to have a child so late in life: Often, we late-in-life babies (read: me) are a surpirise to the parents. Maybe she assumed she could no longer get pregnant at an older age.

[drucat]

I've never been confused re: why she'd have a kid at her age - she's crazy religious enough that I figured she might just be anti birth control, honestly. Still don't get why she wouldn't just go to a hospital though.