Sarah Palin posed at the Governor's desk with a phone in one hand and her five-month-old baby Trig, who has Down syndrome, in the other.  There is baby food and a bottle among the state documents on her desk.   

But behind the birth of this child lies an extraordinary family drama.

In a cover story in the latest issue of People magazine, Sarah Palin reveals she kept her pregnancy a secret for months, even from her own children.

The pregnancy wasn't the only secret.

After 13 weeks she learned her baby had Down syndrome.  She says she broke the news to her husband Todd, saying: "The good news is we have a boy.  But we have a challenge."

She concealed her pregnancy under scarves, shawls and layers of clothing until her seventh month.  Even after she publicly announced she was expecting, she kept news that the baby had Down syndrome from her other children.

"Not knowing in my own heart if I was going to be ready to embrace a child with special needs, I couldn't talk about it," she told People.

"When she found out everything wasn’t okay, she said she wanted to keep the experience for everybody else as brief as possible.  She didn’t want her children to have to worry for months and months what a new sibling was going to mean, and she didn’t want her constituents in Alaska to worry that she wasn't going to be able to get the job done," Sandra Sobieraj, the Washington correspondent for People magazine.

In April 2008, Palin was speaking at a governors' conference in Texas when she unexpectedly went into labor, six weeks before her due date.  She rushed back to Alaska and gave birth eight hours later.

It was only after the baby's birth, in the hospital room, did her children realize the baby had Down syndrome.  It was 14-year-old Willow who asked, "Why didn't you tell us?"
 
Sarah Palin is still breast-feeding the baby, and will continue to do so on the campaign trial.