The choice to have 8 babies

Boston Globe ^ | 2/11/09 | Jeff Jacoby

[MartinaMisc]

THE BACKLASH against Nadya Suleman, the 33-year-old single mother of six who gave birth to octuplets on Jan. 26, has been fierce.

The reactions have ranged from reproach to ridicule to anger. On newspaper editorial pages, radio talk shows, and Internet comment boards, Suleman has been derided as a mental case or a mercenary or worse. There has been no outpouring of gifts from corporate America - nothing like the lifetime supply of Pampers that Procter & Gamble provided when the McCaughey septuplets were born in 1997, or the 15-passenger van Chevrolet donated to their parents. Indeed, one talk-show host warned that his listeners would boycott any company that provided assistance to Suleman and her "freakish" brood.

The fertility doctors who impregnated Suleman have come in for nearly as much abuse as she has. The Orlando Sentinel blasted both mother and doctors as "indulgent, irresponsible, and unethical." Reason magazine's science correspondent, Ronald Bailey, wasn't nearly so restrained; he slammed the "idiotic fertility jockey" who made it possible for this "loony sad jobless single woman" to bear eight more children. Columnist Ellen Goodman suggested that the doctors were guilty of something "akin to malpractice" and that Suleman's decisions were "close to mal-mothering." And there have been calls aplenty for stricter regulation of fertility clinics. "The real issue here," wrote the San Francisco Chronicle's Debra Saunders, "is that we live in a country with so few regulations on the human fertility business."

What does all this criticism mean? Is it once again acceptable in politically correct society to disparage other people's unconventional or unwise reproductive decisions? Have the rules of engagement suddenly changed?

[bluejay]

Wow, a thoughtful article on the topic!

[Pinkbell]

It’s ironic. The liberals that cry that a woman should be able to control her own reproductive choices, and others’ morality should be kept off a woman’s body, never apply that argument to a woman who wants to have a lot of kids, only to a woman who wants to have an abortion.

[Caipirabob]

The liberals would be praising her if this had resulted in 8 abortions.

I would have been happy if they had someone to call "dad".

[Hi Heels]

The choice was to have 14 babies.... without a way to support them.

[Cincinna]

Her choice was to do it at government expense, by artificial means. IMO this should be illegal.

I am all for large families,but implanting eight embryos created ina test tube into a woman who is obviously mentally disturbed is an abomination.

She could afford to pay for all the plastic surgery she has had to make her look like Angekina Jolie, but the IVF goes on the tax payer’s bill.

And we thought “The Boys From Brazil” was just a fantasy novel.

[REPANDPROUDOFIT]

At first I couldn't tell if the author was condemning the mother or the people who are talking about the situation. Two irritating statements:

There has been no outpouring of gifts from corporate America - nothing like the lifetime supply of Pampers that Procter & Gamble provided when the McCaughey septuplets were born in 1997. She glaringly fails to point out that the McCaughey's both worked, had only one child before the pregnancy and there was the little detail of a mom and a dad, married to each other.

What if Suleman's doctors had refused to impregnate a woman who already had six young children but no husband? Would that be discrimination on the basis of marital status ...that is illegal in California. Again the author fails to zoom in on the most important aspect of this case. It isn't that she has no husband as much as it is that she has six other children and no way to support them.

[Hi Heels]

Amen.

[xrmusn]

...if they had someone to call “dad”...
= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =
The dude that wields the turkey baster (or whatever) and pops the eggos into her deserves the title DAD, or at least SURROGATE DAD, and should bear the expense of raising them.

If that were to happen, these fools would not be so quick to use artificial means to impregnate ‘something or someone’.

Who says there is no more manufacturing in the states?

The bozo and the bimbo manufactured 8 wards of the state in a couple of quick, painless(?) applications...

Now that is a quick way to increase your ‘voter base’.

[xtinct]

Dad is the mother's long-time boyfriend. He also provided the sperm for her other 6 children.

Dad needs to be on the hook for support.

[vladimir998]

“What does all this criticism mean? Is it once again acceptable in politically correct society to disparage other people’s unconventional or unwise reproductive decisions? Have the rules of engagement suddenly changed?”

It means people are disgusted that a SINGLE woman, with NO WAY TO SUPPORT HERSELF at this time, SIX KIDS ALREADY AT HOME, who also is mentally ill, decided to have 8 more kids through an artificial means and she expects us to pay for it somehow.

She’s an idiot.

I feel sorry for those kids and their grandparents.

[autumnraine]

Ok fine Jeff Jacoby. Yes, it is a woman’s right to choose to have however many babies she wants, blah blah blah

So that being said, I want her prosecuted for welfare fraud because she obviously doesn’t need food stamps if she has the thousands of dollars for IVF with donor sperm.

[ALPAPilot]

That’s the best solution I’ve heard so far. Make the doctor financially responsible for what he wrought.

[all the best]

It would serve this mad scientist right if she turned around and sued him for child support.

[maica]

The fertility doctors who impregnated Suleman have come in for nearly as much abuse as she has.

****

The fertility doctors who impregnated Suleman should be required to support the eight children that they are responsible for bringing into this world = just as any other sperm donor/father is legally bound by our country’s laws.

Can we call this clinic the Dead Beat Dad Clinic!

[Wolfie]

Wrong. She’s doing it at our expense. My only hope is that some media conglomerate throws millions at her so we don’t end up paying. Of course, that will only lead to more of this nonsense from others.

[668 - Neighbor of the Beast]

I have a long libertarian streak. I don’t think anyone should be passing laws restricting trade by mutual consent. If a woman wants a baby and a doctor wants to help her, the govt should stay the hell out of it.
I especially deplore govt child protective services.
Nevertheless, this particular woman should have been flagged a long time ago. She is clearly out of her mind, and she is playing the system for all it’s worth, abusing the taxpayers and very probably her children as well. The doctors who helped her should be reviewed by the appropriate boards, within an inch of their licenses.

[madprof98]

From the campaign for homosexual marriage to the routine insemination of single women to the legality of abortion on demand, notions that would once have been thought outlandish have steadily been normalized.

EXACTLY RIGHT!!!

[nathanbedford]

What a way to make policy!

I am reminded of the people who rail against other taxpayers who avail themselves of deductions. When your government exploits the tax code to modify behavior, it is presumably because your elected representatives are so in favor of the behavior that they are willing to subsidize it.

It is axiomatic that that which is subsidized increases and that which is taxed decreases. If the government is going to subsidize babies born out of wedlock we are going to have more of them. Presumably society, speaking through its elected representatives, regards having babies out of wedlock to be beneficial to society or it would not subsidize the practice. In fact, our society affords tax deductions for babies born in or out of wedlock, demonstrating our societal belief that having babies is good and good enough to be subsidized. If the baby cannot be afforded, and hence no tax deduction is applicable, society will subsidize the child with direct payments.

Now we have the whole world objecting to someone dutifully complying with our societal values. Perhaps it is not the woman we should be looking to but our tax and welfare policy.

And if we're not willing to look at that policy we should look at ourselves. Every second poster on these threads, and everywhere else for that matter, want to make new policy on the basis of one incident. Some want to jail the doctor, others want to make him pay for the babies, and still others want to relieve them of his license to practice law. Meanwhile the article avers that the left has already deprived the doctor of his right to exercise moral discretion when it comes to impregnating lesbians. Now those of us on the right seem bent to put the doctor in a real squeeze. Fail to impregnate and offend the left. Comply with a mother's wishes and offend the right. God help the poor practitioner in the middle.

And all of this arising out of one isolated case which as far as I can tell has never been replicated. Based on this single incident, we want to deprive doctors of their discretion, perhaps their licenses, and mothers of their choices. Thank God the woman was not a lesbian or the complications would be infinite for we surely could not deny her the right to have her 14 babies.

Is this really how we want to make public policy?

[GovernmentShrinker]

Per an article in the LA Times yesterday
http://www.latimes.com/news/science/la-me-octuplets10-2009feb10,0,3598811.story , losing his medical license looks like the least of this doctor’s problems. For the life of me, I can’t figure out why he and his wife didn’t flee the country before the octuplets were born, while they still could. No way out now, with all the media and law enforcement attention.

He is completely uninsurable now, and would never be able to really practice medicine in the US again, even if he was able to keep or get back his license. At best, he could get a job with some government-run public health program, giving free Pap smears to crack whores and such. But nothing that could make anywhere enough money to cover all the judgements that are going to start piling up against him. The unreported cash payments for treatments will bring the IRS calling. The repeated treatments on this one patient, who was practically his only successful IVF patient, even after she’d had more children than she had any apparent way to support, appeared to be a matter of using her to artificially inflate his otherwise virtually nonexistent “success” rate. He’s facing the loss of his medical license and bankruptcy at the very least, and quite possibly a good chunk of prison time for tax and insurance fraud. Good riddance to him.

Nadya is a well-intentioned victim of her own mental problems, of her well-intentioned but misguided parents who energetically enabled all this, and of her criminally intentioned fertility doctor. I give her and her doctors at Kaiser huge credit for the improbably good outcome of this mega-pregnancy, but plenty of other parties have earned a whacking. High on the list, somewhere below the doctor and above the parents (who seem to have a few mental health issues of their own), are the government agencies that made sure this overwhelmed single mother of six got guided into various welfare programs for herself and her children, including extra checks for 3 “disabled” children (may be mild ADD, slow learning to read, etc, for all we know), but didn’t see fit to guide her into mental health evaluation and treatment. It occurs to me that California’s urgent budget-cutting priorities would do well to start with terminating any state employees (including public school employees) who had contact with this woman prior to her most recent pregnancy and failed to red-flag her for mental health attention.