Kindly Póg Mo Thóin

Does anyone else find the whole octuplets story disturbing?

First, there’s the whole issue of how much the media kvells over mega-multiple births (as long as they’re the right color, of course, or not immigrants) * or women who have child after child because Gawd commands it. TLC has essentially become The Litter Channel, with multiple shows dedicated to glorifying enormous mutliple births (Jon and Kate Plus Eight) or right-wing Quiverful families (17 Children and Counting, though now there are 18), in which this kind of family is presented as gosh darn wacky and loving, with nary a mention of the downside, such as the health problems that mega-multiple babies can have, the enormous expense (both medical and non-medical, the toll on the mothers’ bodies, and in the case of the Duggars, the fact that the whole enterprise is held together by the labor of teenage and preteen girls who shoulder almost the entire daily burden of caring for their siblings and parents (seriously — each child has a “jurisdiction,” which for the girls is “doing all the cooking or laundry for 20 plus childcare for any younger sibling who’s been weaned at 6 months so Michelle can get pregnant again” and for the boys is “walking the dog.” There’s a reason the Duggar girls all look exhausted). It doesn’t help that suppliers of baby products, such as Pampers, rush in to donate diapers or other items (sometimes even houses and minivans) — at least for a while. Once the cameras go away, you’re still left with a huge number of infants to change, clothe and feed.

Then there’s the rather disturbing statements the grandmother of the octuplets has made about her daughter:

LOS ANGELES - The woman who gave birth to octuplets this week conceived all 14 of her children through in vitro fertilization, is not married and has been obsessed with having children since she was a teenager, her mother said.

Angela Suleman told The Associated Press she was not supportive when her daughter, Nadya Suleman, decided to have more embryos implanted last year.

“It can’t go on any longer,” she said in a phone interview Friday. “She’s got six children and no husband. I was brought up the traditional way. I firmly believe in marriage. But she didn’t want to get married.”

Nadya Suleman, 33, gave birth Monday in nearby Bellflower. She was expected to remain in the hospital for at least a few more days, and her newborns for at least a month.

A spokeswoman at Kaiser Permanente Bellflower Medical Center said the babies were were progressing daily, with all eight breathing unassisted and being tube-fed.

While her daughter recovers, Angela Suleman is taking care of the other six children, ages 2 through 7, at the family home in Whittier, about 15 miles east of downtown Los Angeles.

She said she warned her daughter that when she gets home from the hospital, “I’m going to be gone.”

Angela Suleman said her daughter always had trouble conceiving and underwent in vitro fertilization treatments because her fallopian tubes are “plugged up.”

There were frozen embryos left over after her previous pregnancies and her daughter didn’t want them destroyed, so she decided to have more children.

Her mother and doctors have said the woman was told she had the option to abort some of the embryos and, later, the fetuses. She refused.

Her mother said she does not believe her daughter will have any more children.

“She doesn’t have any more (frozen embryos), so it’s over now,” she said. “It has to be.”

Nadya Suleman wanted to have children since she was a teenager, “but luckily she couldn’t,” her mother said.

“Instead of becoming a kindergarten teacher or something, she started having them, but not the normal way,” he mother said.

Her daughter’s obsession with children caused Angela Suleman considerable stress, so she sought help from a psychologist, who told her to order her daughter out of the house.

“Maybe she wouldn’t have had so many kids then, but she is a grown woman,” Angela Suleman said. “I feel responsible and I didn’t want to throw her out.”

I know we’re not supposed to judge women for their reproductive choices, but frankly, this whole thing stinks. And there are a whole lot of people who are affected by this woman’s decisions, from her family (she and her children live with her mother in a small house, and her father has apparently gone back to Iraq — a war zone — where he worked as a contractor, in order to help support the new babies) to her children to the people who will likely wind up being charged higher insurance premiums because of the cost of caring for her and her children,** who are likely to have ongoing medical care. And what about her six older children? A neighbor said that one of her sons has autism. With eight infants introduced to the family, what kind of attention will be paid to his needs?

But if this woman is so obsessed by having children that she’s now had 14 children in 7 years and may only be stopping because she’s run out of frozen embryos, one has to think that she has some serious psychiatric issues that need looking into rather than indulged with fertility treatments. The problem is, we’re not supposed to judge women who want to have lots of children, we’re supposed to look at every birth as a “miracle” and as desirable, we’re supposed to ooh and ahh over the vast medical team assembled for the delivery, we’re supposed to find it heartwarming that government resources are used during a massive disaster to save frozen embryos rather than finding and rescuing real live people, we’re supposed to say that isn’t it great that she was pro-life, had a choice, and refused a selective reduction that would have resulted in fewer, but healthier, and possibly full-term babies.

What we’re not supposed to do is view her as a collector of children and/or pregnancies similar to a cat collector. It’s not difficult to agree that someone with 14 or more cats is someone who’s probably at least overwhelmed and may even be mentally ill, especially if the cats are not properly cared for and half-feral even as the owner insists that she loves her kitties. But in a society that fetishizes huge multiple births, that follows Angelina Jolie around and trumpets trumped-up news of any new sign of a “baby bump” on her (FFS, the woman just had twins, of course she’ll have a little belly for a while), that (as noted above) treats the raising of huge numbers of multiple-order children as wacky-but-manageable, that treats any sign of a woman not being fully into the motherhood experience as evidence of bad morals at the very least, where contraceptive funding as part of an economic-stimulus package is considered controversial because lawmakers can’t conceive (NPI) of children having any sort of economic impact on a family, it’s taboo to discuss whether the desire to have a lot of children is a healthy thing or whether it’s an indication that the amassing of children, without regard to the raising of those children, is itself the goal.

Little psychological research has been conducted on the reasons some mothers seem hooked on repeated pregnancies. David Diamond, a co-director for the Center for Reproductive Psychology in San Diego, said mothers can be drawn to repeat pregnancies for a number of reasons, with some finding the experience so satisfying they choose to become surrogates.

Diane G. Sanford, a psychologist and author specializing in women’s reproductive mental health, said while she doesn’t know much about Nadya Suleman’s background, women that have obsessive-compulsive disorder can become fixated on different obsessions.

“Her obsession centers around children, having children and being a mother,” she said. “To what degree are her esteem and identity based on being a mom and why has this from a young age been such a preoccupation of hers?”

We’re not supposed to suggest that what she may need is psychiatric help instead of more children she’s ill-equipped to care for.

Not every choice is equally a good choice. And while you may well have the right to make a bad choice, that doesn’t mean that the choice can’t be criticized. Sort of like free speech — I’ll defend your right to say stupid, offensive shit, but that doesn’t mean I can’t call it stupid and offensive.

Sure, she’s a grown woman, but she has needed the help of doctors to get pregnant. Doctors have certain ethical obligations. Did not one of these doctors look at the number and spacing of the children she already had, and the circumstances in which she lived, and say, “No”? Or maybe one or more doctors did say, “No,” but she eventually shopped her frozen embryos around to someone who wanted her (or Kaiser’s) money more than he wanted to consider the ethical implications. ***

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* One of the few times you’ll hear of anything negative about high-order multiple births is when they’re born to poor or immigrant couples or single women (as here). I encourage you to read this piece about quadruplets born to a Mexican immigrant woman in Los Angeles; she already had six children, including a set of triplets conceived using fertility drugs that she asked a woman she knew to bring back from Mexico. The article is notable as well for its condemnation of the patriarchy, at least as practiced among immigrant enclaves; the mother had her tubal reversed and then had seven more children because her husband wanted a son. Her sisters, who left LA and moved to non-immigrant-enclaves like Kentucky, don’t feel the same pressure to have so many children to please their husbands.

** The estimated cost to deliver and care for these babies is in the millions of dollars. And fat people can’t get insurance even if they’re perfectly healthy because something *might* happen someday.

*** I’ve read that the standard number of implanted embryos for a woman under 35 undergoing fertility treatment is no more than two. It’s unclear whether that was the number implanted; I’ve seen speculation that because the mother was taking fertility drugs, the implanted embryos divided. It was also believed that there were 7 fetuses, not 8.