By now everyone has heard of the set of octuplets born to a California woman, Nadya Suleman, earlier this week. Something tells me, however, that the usual morning talk show and chick media flailing over the latest Litter o’ MiraclesTM isn’t going to happen now that it’s also been revealed that Mom already has six kids. Add in that the sperm donor doesn’t seem to be in the picture-media reports state Mom lives with her parents and other kids with no mention of a husband or boyfriend-and all the outlets that would have come billing and cooing are instead turning to “experts” who state that “the human body isn’t meant to have litters.”
Well, duh. See, in America we like our litter bearers to be pretty white middle-class married women (or who could be made to look pretty, as Bobbi “Iowa Septuplets” McCaughey was after several thousand dollars worth of plastic and dental surgery) who were either childless or just had one and wanted another baby SOOOOOO much. Say what you want about the Duggars, but they did not turn to chemical help to get their eighteen. By all accounts the fourteen kids were all courtesy of our friend in vitro fertilization. You know how the antis always call abortion an industry? Well, here’s your true industry-the business of babymaking. And it is far more unethical than abortion.
I’ve frequently gotten in trouble for my views on fertility treatments, to the point of losing some online relationships over it. No one has ever died from not being able to have a baby. When there are so many children already out there, the insistence of having one’s own strikes me as supremely selfish. People who whine about how expensive and time-consuming adoption is but who happily throw money at fertility clinics for years on end get zero sympathy from me. These women need to tell the truth-they don’t want to be mothers. They just want to be pregnant. And the doctors? Seriously, if you’re in med school and you want to get into a specialty where you’ll make bookoo bucks? Go into infertility treatment, which fails eighty percent on the time so you’ll have lots of repeat customers. And now a lot of insurance companies pay for treatment (but not contraception, what a surprise) so you can collect from the poor people too.
As a pro-choice woman I must support all choices, even ones with which I don’t agree. Stuff like this makes it damn hard, though. Ethical questions need to be raised, as in “what the fuck kind of doctor/clinic knowingly implants that many embryoes into a woman who already has six kids and apparently no means of independent support?” Was it as the litter bearer, who has been coming out to the media little by little, claims-that she got paid? I have heard talk here and there about some states possibly enacting laws concerning the number of embryoes that can be implanted at one time and something tells me that after this the talk is going to get louder-as it should. As much as the antis accuse pro-choicers of devaluing children, this is a prime example of devaluation. Did the litter bearer think Today and Good Morning America and People were going to come running with Angelina Jolie-like offers of millions for her “incredibly brave story”? Did she believe companies would fall over themselves offering her free stuff? She had reason to-after all, it gets done all the time. But she didn’t count on the negative backlash, a lot of it from her outwardly extremely dysfunctional family. And I know damn well she wasn’t thinking about those kids in neonatal ICU-or the six (including one autistic son) she already had.
Get out the popcorn, the circus is just beginning.
