‘unconventional’ choices

First I want to go ahead and acknowledge that this post is going to make some people unhappy and others may agree completely and others may not give a damn. Fine, thats your prerogative and now that thats out of the way…

Unless you’ve been living under a rock lately you’ve seen the news, the shows, the articles about Nadya Suleman the 33-year-old single mom from SoCal who just recently gave birth to Octuplets giving her a total of FOURTEEN (14) children. Yes, she already had six kids at home. Yes, she was living in a house her parents bought her. Yes, she was not working. Yes, her parents went bankrupt shortly after they bought her a house and had to move in with her.

She had been working, but went on Disability in 1999 for work related reasons (though if you can spit out 14 kids, you most certainly are not disabled!). She hasn’t found another job (as taking care of 6 kids by oneself is a full time job) but she is planning on going back to school to get her masters degree at some point.

All 14 of her children were conceived via in vitro fertilization from the SAME sperm donor. This is where my issues with her begin to take shape. I think its wonderful that she wants to be a mother. I think its even better that she refuses to live on welfare (and instead depends on her parents). Those are two good attributes that more people in our society should adopt as their own. Where she went wrong though was the way to do it.

I’m not speaking out about single parents, several of my friends are single parents due to the results of divorce and while unfortunate, I’m certain that they can handle it and Ms. Suleman may be more than capable of handling one, two or three kids on her own. However, 14 all under the age of seven need a level of looking out for that a working single parent cannot provide. The issue I seem to have with Ms. Suleman (and the clinic that helped with the process) is that it was a little selfish to not consider the well being of the children she would be mothering.

This has been brought up on almost every TV News show (20/20, 60 minutes, etc) and I’m not going to go further, but if she really wanted to be a mother, why couldn’t she have considered adoption? Certainly, it had to be more cost effective than the in vitro process. If you want to know a little more about her, NBC.com has a good piece that covers both her motives and the risk to mother and child. I’d love to know what you think about the whole situation….

3 Comments to “‘unconventional’ choices”

Gruntled 6 February 2009 at 1:10 pm #

When they do the fertilization, they don’t really know how many babies it will end up making. There’s a whole battery of conditioning to help the chances of getting a pregnancy to happen. Anyway, I agree that the possible outcomes should definitely be weighed seriously.

Gruntled’s last blog post..Watching the Wildlife

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Melanie 6 February 2009 at 4:14 pm #

Mostly I don’t understand how it’s more difficult to adopt a child than to have IVF (I hear about all sorts of loving, stable families being rejected by DFACS, and yet here Suleman is…). I suppose at the end of the day, she’s no worse than the girl who lives in my neighborhood who has four kids and is still in high school. Or the 26-year-old unmarried unemployed woman down the street with six kids. Also, dozens of families happily have a litter of IVF kids when they clearly don’t have the means to raise such a big family. What I want to know is who’s paying for the fertility treatments? My understanding is that it costs thousands of dollars for every attempt at IVF. Who’s paying for all of this medical care?

Yeah, it makes me kind of angry, but who am I to say what the woman can & can’t do?

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Mouseclone 10 February 2009 at 1:20 pm #

Personally I think that she should have been spaded a long time ago. Stupidity should hurt and although she gave birth, her suffering should be longer and more of it. It is not the fault of the children on the other hand. I’m sure that when her parents die, she will depend on the state to fund her. What a dumb stupid selfish bitch.

Mouseclone’s last blog post..Is the Universe telling me something?

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