Sarah Palin says 17-year-old daughter is pregnant

ST. PAUL, Minn. – Republican vice presidential hopeful Sarah Palin said today that her 17-year old daughter, Bristol, is pregnant and plans to wed.

In a statement released by the campaign, Sarah and Todd Palin did not say when their daughter told them the news. But John McCain’s campaign aides said that Palin had volunteered the information in an interview with McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, before he chose Palin as his running mate.

“Our beautiful daughter Bristol came to us with news that as parents we knew would make her grow up faster than we had ever planned. We’re proud of Bristol’s decision to have her baby and even prouder to become grandparents,” Sarah Palin, 44, and her husband said in the statement. “As Bristol faces the responsibilities of adulthood, she knows she has our unconditional love and support.

“Bristol and the young man she will marry are going to realize very quickly the difficulties of raising a child, which is why they will have the love and support of our entire family,” the Palins’ statement continued. “We ask the media to respect our daughter and Levi’s privacy as has always been the tradition of children of candidates.”

The disclosure roiled the Republican National Convention, which today began its first session, abbreviated because of Hurricane Gustav. The initial political reaction was one of dismay, but it was unclear whether there would be any long-term fallout, especially from the conservative right, which favors abstinence over sex education.

In the days since Palin – who is in her first term as governor of Alaska – was announced as McCain’s choice, bloggers and correspondents have clogged the Internet with rumors about her family. It was the increasingly nasty tone that finally prompted the campaign to issue the statement, according to GOP strategist Steve Schmidt.

Schmidt was surrounded by cameras and reporters as he walked through the media center today. Peppered with questions, Schmidt, who has traveled with Palin in recent days, told reporters that Bristol, who is five months pregnant, should remain off-limits.

“Life happens in families. I think that if people try to politicize this, the American people will be appalled by it,” Schmidt said.

“The fact is that the American people, who are decent people, don’t appreciate intrusions into the private space of good families – of families who are dealing with real problems,” he said.

Asked whether the teenager’s impending marriage had anything to do with trying to ameliorate voters’ concerns, Schmidt responded: “I’m not a psychic. I don’t know. The marriage is a private affair. And their privacy should be respected.”

McCain has yet to comment on when he knew of the pregnancy or whether it would hurt him with social conservatives, who have had problems with a McCain candidacy but have strongly supported Palin.

The Arizona senator has not held a news conference or met members of the traveling media who cover his campaign full time since Aug. 13, nearly three weeks ago, in Birmingham, Mich.

After a campaign event in Monroe, Mich., Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama insisted that there should be limits to media inquires.

“Let me be as clear as possible. I have said before and I will repeat again. I think people’s families are off limits. And people’s children are especially off limits,” he said.

“This shouldn’t be part of our politics. It has no relevance to Gov. Palin’s performance as a governor or her potential performance as a vice president. So I would strongly urge people to back off these kinds of stories.”

In response to a question, Obama angrily denounced a report on Reuters from an unnamed McCain advisor that the Obama campaign was somehow involved in blogs on the subject.

“Our people were not involved in any way in this,” he said. “They will not be. And if I ever thought there was somebody in my campaign that was involved in something like that, they’d be fired.”

Bristol appeared in Dayton, Ohio, on Friday holding her 4 1/2 -month-old brother, Trig, when McCain announced that he had chosen Palin as his running mate.

The next day, Bristol did not appear at a rally in Washington, Pa. Palin told the crowd that it was Trig’s nap time and that he was on the bus with his sister. Bristol also did not join her family in O’Fallon, Mo., on Sunday.

Karen Rhoades, a substitute teacher in Palin’s hometown of Wasilla, Alaska, is a good friend of the soon-to-be vice presidential nominee and said that Bristol’s pregnancy was well known in town. “People here knew about it, and it wasn’t any big secret. It’s not something we talk about because it’s rude to gossip.”

The campaign said that Bristol is 17. However, Rhoades said, “I spoke to Sarah a week ago, and she said ‘Bristol is 18, and she can make whatever decision now that she thinks is right.’ ”

Bristol is “finishing up her last year in high school,” Rhoades said.

“With Sarah being vice president,” said Rhoades, “she is not going to have day-to-day grandma duties. I am assuming Bristol and her husband will live here in Alaska with the rest of her family and they will do their best to be good parents. They have a supporting family, very loving and close. Bristol and the baby will be fine.”

The Palin children, said Rhoades, “are everybody’s dream kids – smart, kind, they are just good kids. I know all of them, they don’t cause their parents any more grief than other kids do. They have never gotten in trouble with the law. You couldn’t have nicer kids than they are.”

James Dobson, head of the conservative Colorado-based group Focus on the Family, praised the Palins, stating they should “be commended once again for not just talking about their pro-life and pro-family values, but living them out even in the midst of trying circumstances.”

“Being a Christian does not mean you’re perfect. Nor does it mean your children are perfect,” Dobson said. He added that the media was “already trying to spin this as evidence that Palin is a hypocrite, but all it really means is that she and her family are human.”

When Palin was running for governor in 2006, she was asked to complete an Eagle Forum Alaska questionnaire that included questions about abortion and sex education.

In her answers, according to the Eagle Forum Alaska blogspot, she said she would support funding for abstinence-until-marriage education instead of explicit sex education programs, school-based clinics and condom distribution in schools.

“The explicit sex-ed programs will not find my support,” Palin responded, according to the blog site.

Palin has said abortion should not be legal unless the life of the mother would end as a result of the pregnancy.

“I believe that no matter what mistakes we make as a society, we cannot condone ending an innocent’s life,” she said in the questionnaire.

Palin arrived in the Twin Cities last night, and campaign aides said she is working on her speech today with no public events.

“Obviously it’s been quite a whirlwind week for her, so I think it’s also a good opportunity for her to catch her breath and catch up on some of the correspondence and calls and what not that she has,” McCain campaign manager Rick Davis said in a morning conference call.

 maeve.reston@latimes.com

 robin.abcarian@latimes.com

 mark.barabak@latimes.com

Times staff writers Noam N. Levey, Bob Drogin and Michael Muskal contributed to this report.