It’s been reported that at least one is autistic.
Exactly. If she’s getting food stamps/SSI/whatever for any of these kids and yet she has the money for IVF, there’s almost certainly some welfare fraud going on.
I mean, if she had started driving around town in a brand new car it would probably trigger an investigation. As I understand it, that’s the order of magnitude we’re talking about here, moneywise.
As to the OP–she’s crazy, and probably deserves pity as much as anything. The doctor and anybody else who could have shut this pregnancy down before it started are criminals.
Total anecdote that I heard on the radio this morning: The Beverly Hills fertility doctor who performed the implantation has practically no successful births to his credit, except this patient.
If she’s supposed to be his testimonial to an ability to perform the procedure, maybe he was doing it pro bono.
Anyway, as I said, this was based on some throw-away comments from the staff on a morning drive show. Take it for what it’s worth.
Yeah, I’m definitely more interested in the doctor in this case than the woman, who is obviously batshit crazy.
I know a (very) little about IVF, since my sister and her husband went through it three times a few years ago. (They have two four-year-olds now, yay! and are getting ready to start the process of adopting a third child.) Anyway, I was talking with my sister about this and she was just astounded. Apparently her doctor was cautious about putting in even two viable embryos at a time. “Are you sure you want to do two? There’s always a possibility that they might split, so you need to consider that.” Etc.
And the reason is because multiple births like this are dangerous, for both the mother and the babies. Even twins have a higher rate of complications, prematurity, etc., let alone eight freakin’ babies at a time. This doctor needs to have his license revoked–he put her and her babies’ lives in danger needlessly.
And that’s leaving aside the ethical considerations of implanting six embryos in a woman who already had six children under the age of seven that she couldn’t afford to take care of properly.
According to the interview with her on Dateline tonight, one is autistic and two have ADD.
She claims to be going back to school soon. How will she pay for that? How can she afford daycare for 14 kids?
I’m having a lot of trouble with the idea that children with these issues are eligible, much less receiving, Social Security Disability insurance.
I’ll take crazy AND selfish for 1 million, Alex. She keeps talking about what these children mean to her-but what about THEM? All I can think of is how are these poor kids going to survive? She seems to care more about having children, than, well, raising them and caring for them. As her mother said, it’s somehow an addiction, and she needs some serious help.
I’d feel sorry for her, except that there are now fourteen victims of her disorder.
Even more so, it’s dangerous-human females are NOT meant to have litters. It’s a potentially life-threatening situation, not all of the infants survive, and the mother faces complications herself.
We’re not cats.
Taking advantage of her parents is puting it mildly:
According to Wiki, her father’s returned to Iraq as an interpreter* simply to take care of the whole lot of them, the family had to declare bankruptcy, lost one of their homes, etc.
HOWEVER…in this case-these ARE their grandchildren, and they probably can’t bring themselves to put them out as well. So that’s probably a big factor-and I’m guessing that the grandmother is completely overwhelmed, frightened, and doesn’t know what to do.
*Although in this case, perhaps he wanted to get away from all those kids!
Didn’t The Simpsons do an episode about this? Remember? Apu. 
Not really, Apu was married and had a job. He wasn’t collecting government checks from a variety of sources… Also, after having his first brood, Apu didn’t: attempt to have a second brood (he knew better), didn’t run out and get plastic surgery, he didn’t claim an ‘injury’ with the Quickie Mart (and collect money that he funneled into various unnecessary medical procedures, and none of his kids (that we know of) are receiving SSI.
Suleman clearly has some image issues as well. Take a look at the before and after pics here: Cele|bitchy | Nadya Suleman before plastic surgery; gets food stamps, child disability
Agreed! The woman is obviously a fair bit over the hedge, but it’s the doctor who performed the procedure who concerns me more. When I was toying with IVF, the doctors I spoke with all had waivers you’d have to sign agreeing that they would implant no more than three eggs at a time, and would selectively reduce the count if anything more than twins, maybe triplets, came of it. Because more babies are more dangerous to the mother and reduce the odds of a healthy outcomes for each member of the litter.
“crazy, selfish or normal?”
I think these three categories overlap. Normal people can be both selfish & crazy.
As for the woman in question, what she did was morally barely different from if she’d only had 3 embryos implant on her sixth pregancy & insisted on delivering them all–in which case those who knew her would call her nutty, but she’d not have made the national news.
I think the real lesson is that pro-life ethics don’t mix well with IVF.
Actually, IVF ethics work fine with IVF, as long as you’re not hypocritical about it, and you don’t go to a whack doctor who implants you with a gazillion embryos at once.
My sis and her husband are extremely pro-life, and they were worried before they started the process because if they had been able to have 20 viable embryos, then they would have had to go through the process for each of those embryos (although not all at once, obviously.) I don’t remember what their total count was for all three attempts, but every single viable embryo they had got a chance at life…none of them were discarded, even after they had already had their twins. To them, it would have been no different than throwing their 2-year-olds in the nearest dumpster.
Now, these are their views and not mine, but I do have respect for them for practicing what they preach.
It’s fertility drugs that are more dubious, because that can up the numbers without you having any say-so. With IVF, you have control over how many you’re going to have at a time, which is what the uproar is about in this case.
Amended: the real lesson is that pro-life ethics don’t mix well with IVF when the limit of one’s means has already been met.
If miss baby factory had had eight kids and was living in a comfortable mansion and able to raise them all well, this would be a curiosity, not an uproar.
Agreed.
ETA: Whoops, just noticed a mistake in my previous post…pro-life ethics work fine with IVF, etc.
Now she has put up a website to beg for paypal donations. I won’t link to it, since I don’t want to help her get any donations. If people donate, it will only encourage others to do something this foolish.
This lady is a world class parasite. While apparently lacking the intelligence or skills to actually be a productive member of society, she is at least smart enough to recognize that a great way to extort money from other people is to make it “For the Children”.
People who wouldn’t have donated money just to her if she didn’t have any kids will donate money to her now because, after all, nobody wants to see those poor babies suffer because of their mom’s poor planning!
I am sure she is expecting someone to offer to give her a nicer house for the kids’ sake and all those other kinds of donations that people who have a bunch of kids often get from well wishers.
Personally, I would like it if all the outrage about her keeps people from donating to her and she realizes she actually has to find a way to take care all of these kids on her own instead of expecting yet more handouts from society.
Preach it, my brother.
I think a lot of people who say, “Why don’t you just adopt?” do not have a real understanding of what it actually takes to adopt a child.
I am an adoptive mom, and I love my little punkin pie to death, and I’d go to hell and back for him. Twice. But it was not an easy road to get here.
I know plenty of people who have had happy, meaningful lives living 8 kids and parents to one room. Chinese college students typically live in 6-8 person dorms. Now, this woman is surely crazy and the circumstances are far from ideal and I’m not at all saying she did a good thing. But there is no reason why sharing a bedroom with a few siblings should screw you up for life. Millions of people do it and it works out.
Did those people live in the U.S., though? In modern times? If you live in a community where almost everyone else is flat broke and living 10 to a room, then you can be happy (at least as happy as that sort of extreme poverty allows), but if you live in a society where everyone else has much, much more than you, and you and your siblings are the only ones living in House of a Thousand Kidlets, it makes you different and does cause damage to you socially as a child, which then can impact the rest of your life. I’m not saying “Oh, 100 percent, these kids will be messed up for life” and I hope that’s not the case, but they’re going to grow up far outside the community standard, probably very poor and starved for attention no matter what the mom does. (She’s only one person, and love doesn’t produce clones of yourself to give all those kids the amount of attention they would need to not feel like a number, and then there’s all the teasing and stigma they’ll have at school, too.)
Those 8 kids were not all from one litter, though. This woman deliberately had a litter of kids, despite the fact that she already had half a dozen. Being one kid of a set of octuplets is going to attract all sorts of attention. The kids are not going to be recognized as individuals, but as part of a group, for the most part. That’s not healthy. These kids are not going to be able to get the individual parental attention and resources they need. That’s not healthy.
I totally agree with Lynn. These children will have a far better chance of living healthy, individualised lifestyles if they are adopted out, than if they stay in the circus that household is going to become.