Octuplet Obsession

To keep this blog on the cutting edge of cultural developments, today I would like to address a serious issue that has come to the forefront in the last month. In case you have been under a rock, a woman, Nadya Suleman, – mother of 6 – had octuplets. I wanted to spend this entry going off on her, but I will let someone else do that. The following is an editorial is by Jim Wooten and from The Atlanta Journal-Constitution on Sunday, February 08, 2009. I have edited it for content and space but you can read the entire article here.

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Octuplets and all children deserve better

The octuplets born to an unmarried woman in California are consequences of self-centeredness gone awry. The woman, Nadya Suleman, had six children, all conceived with the help of a sperm-donor friend. The eight born last month grew from six implanted embryos, life created with friend-donated sperm. She told NBC’s “Today” show that she wanted a large family because she felt alone as an only child. “All I wanted was children,” she said. “I wanted to be a mom. That’s all I ever wanted in my life. I love my children.” The outrage is that a narcissistic adult, for her own pleasure, intentionally brought 14 children into the world, children who will never know their father. It was a conscious, medically assisted choice to have multiple births —- a decision suggesting an impaired mental state that should have raised questions about her fitness as the primary adult female in the children’s lives.

The octuplets should be a wake-up call to the nation. It is child cruelty to inflict the suffering on human life that Suleman visits upon these 14 children. As Georgia Supreme Court Chief Justice Leah Ward Sears has noted, children born to unmarried women and to those in cohabiting relationships “must often overcome increased risks of poverty, education failure, child abuse, delinquency, emotional distress and mental illness.” The focus of all law and public policies really should be reoriented to children. They desperately need protection from self-centered adults who casually create life for reasons that are frivolous and self-indulgent. The octuplets’ birth dramatically highlights the plight of children carelessly and frivolously conceived. It should be the spectacle that prompts ministers, educators, entertainers, politicians, aunts, uncles and other family members need to recognize the harm unmarried adults are causing to children.

Life begins at conception. Anything adults do prior to that moment that doesn’t harm a third person is their business. At the moment of life, however, the wants and even the needs of the adults are incidental to those of the child. These 14 children need a protector.
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Here are some additional statistics for you to consider from an article on yahoo.com:

Suleman has been supporting her six other children with $490 a month in food stamps and receives Social Security disability payments for three of the youngsters that could total $2,379 a month.
She has estimated her in vitro fertilization procedures have cost $100,000.
Suleman has said she saved for the treatments by working double shifts and also used money from a disability award exceeding $165,000 that she received after an on-the-job back injury.
The Suleman octuplets' medical costs have not been disclosed, but in 2006, the average cost for a premature baby's hospital stay in California was $164,273, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Eight times that equals $1.3 million.
For a single mother, the cost of raising 14 children through age 17 ranges from $1.3 million to $2.7 million, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

If you want to get into the “medicine” of the story, you can go here.

Her personal website. Not much there, but you can donate if you feel led.

So here’s how I feel. I think she is selfish and unnecessarily burdening herself and the rest of us to fulfill some need of hers. If she wants to have children and love them, then fine – I don’t begrudge her that. But when she already has 6 children and spending $100,000 on fertilization techniques whose end result could be nothing other that the birth of multiple children is irresponsible and selfish. There are plenty of options for her to have children and not be such a burden – being a foster mother is one good option. Another would have been to spend the $100,000 on adopting children because God knows there are plenty of children both here in America and abroad that desperately need a good home. Does she deserve the death threats she has received? Of course not. But something has to be done for the future to keep this sort of thing from happening. I implore lawmakers to seriously consider barring these doctors from practicing this brand of “medicine” that is so manipulative and has such wide reaching consequences.

I wish her the best, but expect the worst. I know my tax dollars will help give these kids what they need to survive. I just wish they had been spent elsewhere.