Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin told an antiabortion audience in Indiana on Thursday night that, "for a fleeting moment," she considered having an abortion after learning that her son Trig would have Down syndrome.
The experience, she added, "now lets me understand a woman's, a girl's, temptation to maybe make it all go away."
Ultimately, Palin said, she decided she had to "walk the walk" concerning her long-standing antiabortion views. She avoided using the word "abortion" in her speech, preferring the phrase "change the circumstances."
"I had just enough faith to know that my trying to change the circumstances wasn't any answer," said Palin, the featured speaker before 3,000 people at a banquet in Evansville.
As the Republican Party's vice presidential candidate last year, Palin said little about her son's condition or the circumstances surrounding his birth. The night before the election, Palin's campaign released a letter from her physician that gave information about Trig's diagnosis. Cathy Baldwin-Johnson wrote that Palin learned in the second trimester that he had Down syndrome.
