Wednesday, February 11, 2009

In Defense of Octuplets Mother?

I watched part of the Dateline special last night on the new Octuplet mother, Nadya Suleman. I think this story is quite interesting because it touches on so many aspects of life that people are not comfortable with. Outright, I should admit that it IS irresposible for someone to have 14 children when they don't have a job and are living at home with their parents. However, I am curious what the reaction would be if she WAS married. Would there be such an uproar? I mean, there is a TV show on following the lives of a family (married man and woman) with 8 kids - how different is that? Look, I am not condoning what Suleman has done. I think it's practically immoral to bring 14 kids into this world without being able to provide for them. But, let's face it: as a society, we are uncomfortable with women reproducing on their own. This is such a big story because she used a spem donor, did not get pregnant the "old fashioned way", is single and making decisions to have children without a husband, and her decisions have resulted in her giving birth to a litter of kids instead of just one or two. Granted, I can't figure out the logistics of the whole thing. She's had 6 children, including 2 sets of twins. Which means that she has either been super-ovulated a lot (meaning, the give you BIG doses of hormones to make you ovulate multiple eggs at once) or something just isn't right here. Normally, once you've been superovulated, they collect the eggs and fertilize them with sperm, allow them to develop (meaning, the cells divide a few times). Any embryos that do not divide or that look abnormal are discarded, and only healthy embryos are frozen down or implanted in the mother. This means that she's been superovulated at least 4 times, implanting multiple embryos and that twice it resulted in a multiple birth. More that likely, she has undergone many more than 4 superovulations and has been implanted more than 4 times (to get her previous 6 kids). I mean, the chances of 6 embryos being implanted and all of them taking to the uterus and two of them dividing into monozygotic twins is remarkable. Either the doctor really knew what they were doing or some sort of freak occurrence happened. Anyways, the whole situation just kinda makes me sad. It's sad for the kids, since they'll be ridiculed for being her children. It's sad for the octuplets because they were born WAY too early and will likely have development problems and disablilites. And it's sad for the mom because I am pretty sure she has some sort of a mental illness. I just hope those kids can get the best care they deserve. Because, truthfully, we can't do anything about Suleman now, all we can do is hope she raises her kids well and that she turns out to be a good mom in the long run. And God know, we hope she's done with having kids and this leads to legislation regarding implantation of embryos. Only a maximun of 2-3 should be implanted at one time.

1 comment:

Randi said...

Just looking at her picture, I think she wants to be Angelina Jolie.