The California woman who had eight babies at once apparently had been undergoing fertility treatment. Isn’t this what happened on “The Simpsons” with Apu and his wife? (Homer and others were slipping them fertility mickeys, as I recall.) I thought that was just a joke. Is this just a coincidence or is there some causation?
Is there a connection between fertility treatments and octuplets? Well… Fertility drugs make pregnancies of multiples more likely, the fact that Apu’s wife and this woman both had eight is more of a coincidence.
Typically, women have one egg released a month. Sometimes two or more may be released naturally. However, fertility drugs can cause a much larger number of eggs to be released which can potentially all be fertilized, resulting in larger pregnancies than would commonly occur in humans in nature. This is useful when the eggs are to be harvested and fertilized using IVF as it reduces the number of times the woman needs to undergo the invasive (and sometimes painful) collection process and cuts months off the process.
In this particular case, it wasn’t fertility drugs that were to blame. It seems that the woman was implanted with multiple embryos - I’m guessing eight, but it’s possible there were more that didn’t take, or fewer and one/some divided into identical twins. It’s quite common for embryos not to “take” so implanting more than one gives you better odds of achieving a pregnancy, however the ethics of implanting so many are debatable - where I live it would be illegal, as doctors are required by law to implant no more than two embryos at a time in order to avoid just this sort of thing happening. The larger the number of fetuses, the greater the risk to both mother and babies.
What kind of doctor would give fertility treatments to a woman who already has six kids?
But those six don’t match!
(I wondered the same thing.)
She was implanted with multiple fertilized embryos, which is done routinely. Usually, if you implant 8 or 10 embryos, if you’re lucky, one - maybe two - will be a success and grow, so they use a lot to try and ensure a successful result. Sometimes you get lucky (or unlucky, depending on your point of view), and they’ll all manage to implant and grow. I don’t know how many embryos they used with this woman, but obviously it was at least eight.
I can’t find the articles now, but I’ve seen fertility workers being quoted in online articles saying that implanting 8-10 is irresponsible. My sister had IVF in the eighties and the doctor wanted to implant 5. The trend since then has apparently been to lower the number even further. Three was quoted as an acceptable maximum in one article, although that might represent the max at just one clininc or for just one doctor.
My sister held out for 3 implanted. She wasn’t up for removing extras after implantation and figured 3 was all that she could handle. She ended with twins.
I had a boss who’s wife had IVF. The Dr. wanted to implant 5 or 6 and then selectively abort down to 2 after things settled down. He and his wife said no and chose to implant only 3. They wound up having twins.
Why would this be relevant, ethically speaking? A hundred years ago, it was not terribly uncommon for women to have 14 full-term pregnancies in a lifetime (though admittedly 14 children surviving to adulthood is a different story).
I can see an argument for prioritizing the childless for fertility treatments, and I can see why a history of a woman’s previous pregnancies and births would be relevant. And personally I think 14 children is too many (though if you’re raising 8, having six in-home babysitters might be useful). I just can’t see how a doctor could ethically make the decision as to how many children is too many.
Good question. A doctor in this CBS New story suggested that she might have been taking the fertility drugs on her own. Is that possible? Are fertility drugs available over the counter?
My understanding is that the number of implants increases with the woman’s age, since viability decreases with age. A woman over 40 may receive up to 5 implants . . . but certainly not a woman like this one, in her early thirties. And it is done with the understanding that not all implants will take, and if they do, there will be culling. To implant 8 (or more)into a woman in her early 30s, and to let all remain - jeopardizing the mother and the babies - seems to be irresponsible.
Not to mention her existing 6 children are all 7 and under, with 2 being the youngest. Isn’t IVF a very last resort in infertility treatments? The scenario wherein a woman with 6 existing children, but within 2 years of the last child, she suffers infertility to the extent she gets IVF and gets implanted with 8 embryos, certainly does seem very implausible.
My speculation is that she is pro-life and insisted on all fertilized eggs being implanted, so that might explain why the doctor went with 8.
That would still be a bizarre decision, even for a radical pro-life couple. It’s quite typical to freeze extra viable embryos to be used in the future, since the success rate of a single IVF attempt is well below 50%. They could have implanted, say, four, and then have used the other four a couple of years later on. Or placed those embryos up for adoption.
It’s not my understanding that the babies’ father is with the family, so “couple” strikes me as an inoperative term.
Here are some more details. The secondary question here might be… are there any ethical rules in place to govern the medical decision to undergo IVF, and if so, what are they? When I had a cochlear implant, they evaluated my situation thoroughly to make sure I had the proper support and environment, had realistic expectations, could take the time in my life to do the training, would not be harmed by long-term effects, etc.
That really depends on the patient in question. Most doctors will not transfer more than three to someone that young with recent prior proven fertility. The rest, if in good condition after a certain number of days, will be frozen in case the woman wants to try again.
You just never know what is going to happen with IVF. You can implant 3 embryos that result in 0 births or 6 births because the implanted embryos can divide and become identical twin sets. I have a friend who is currently doing IVF. The clinic counsels them to introduce 3 embryos and no more. The doctor says that more than one time, he has inserted 3 embryos that resulted in 5 to 7 live births.
I have no idea what sort of crazy person would have 6 kids and risk heavy multiples just to have one more. IVF is an elective medical procedure… if someone has the money, you can find a clinic that will do it. But IVF is not cheap - the million dollar question here is who paid for this procedure.
Our IVF doctor won’t implant more than 3, and he’s really only comfortable doing 2.
Ed
The six existing children may have had a different father (or fathers). Fertility treatment may have been necessary if her partner at the time (assuming she had one and wasn’t just using donor sperm) had subnormal fertility. There’s also a chance that she was having fertility problems of her own, even though she had successful pregnancies in the past (and note that one of her previous pregnancies was with twins, so perhaps she had already had fertility treatments to achieve her prior pregnancies).
I don’t really think it’s up to a doctor to decide if their patient’s family is large enough already so I can’t see any basis for a doctor to refuse fertility treatment to someone who already has children but is having problems conceiving again. I do think a doctor ought to have some say about acceptable risks and limit the number of embryos they implant to avoid pregnancies this large.
What I want to know is who is paying for this. This treatment is expensive. Based on the news stories she and her parents are not wealthy, and there is no husband/father around. Since she has 6 children, it doesn’t seem she’s infertile, so I don’t think insurance would pay.
I’ve worked for companies where they’d pick up part of the tab for such things. I don’t know the limitations (i.e. you can’t have any other kids or what), nor how much it paid towards the cost, but I know they kicked in for at least part of it.
I wonder if the mother isn’t part of some kind of religious cult? The Raelians were claiming that they were going to do human cloning at one time, and while the story was certainly BS, one can’t rule out the possibility of a cult deciding that she was the “perfect mother” to receive the seed of the leader. It would explain a few things, like where the money came from, and how she was able to do it.