The Excesses of the Octuplets’ Mom
I hesitate to write anything more than I already have about Nadya Suleman and her octuplets. I posted on this topic last week, after all; it was all the pixels I wanted to spend on this topic. My previous post was comparatively mild.
Since then, however, I’ve seen her interviews with the media — both current and past — and I’ve become more disgusted with her and with her choices. At the center of this, of course, is the fourteen children that she has brought into this world — fourteen innocents who did not have a choice in this matter. No, the choices were all Suleman’s and her doctor’s — who should have known her circumstances if he did not and never should have been party to this if he did.
Her circumstances (see the quoted LA Times article, below, for more details):
- She has six other children, at least two of whom are disabled. That is, of course, before the other eight are factored into this equation.
- She is unemployed.
- She receives federal food stamps to feed herself and her children.
- She does not have a house of her own; she has been living with her parents.
- She does not have the means to support the six children she already has, much less the eight more she just gave birth to.
The Los Angeles Times put it best, calling Nadya Suleman’s story grotesque. It is. Here’s the whole column. It’s well worth reading and isn’t particularly long.
These are somber and sobering times, but they may offer us the opportunity to reexamine not only the material extravagance that has characterized so much of our recent life, but also some of its emotional excesses.
Take, for example, the grotesque story of Nadya Suleman, the sad and disturbing serial mom whose apparent addiction to childbirth recently resulted in the delivery of octuplets. That brought the 33-year-old, unemployed single mother’s “family” to 14 — including a set of twins — all conceived through in vitro fertilization, all reportedly at the same Beverly Hills fertility clinic.
As one detail concerning this bizarre sequence piles on another, this strange young woman’s odd story seems to be moving out of the freak show that nowadays passes for far too much of our news and into the realm where serious — rather than merely prurient — thoughts occur.
The treatments Suleman underwent to bear her children aren’t cheap; they typically run from $8,000 to $15,000. Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that her doctor gave her the lower rate (as a volume discount), which would put her expenses, simply for conception, at $48,000. Suleman told a television interviewer that she covered those costs out of a $165,000 disability settlement she obtained after suffering a back injury working at a state mental hospital.
She also said she is not “on welfare,” which is a bit of a semantic dodge, because it turns out she’s receiving both food stamps and Social Security payments for two of her children who suffer from unspecified disabilities. She also told the interviewer she plans to “support” her family with federally guaranteed student loans while she pursues a master’s in counseling. (One tries to imagine receiving therapy from this woman, but the mind refuses to form the requisite image.)
In the meantime, the Kaiser Permanente hospital where the eight newborns remain under care reportedly has applied to the state for assistance with its expenses under the Medi-Cal program. We don’t know yet whether any of the octuplets will be disabled in ways requiring public assistance. It appears that, in the case of the Suleman family, raising 14 children takes not simply a village but the combined resources of the county, state and federal governments.
The manifest irresponsibility of this eccentric woman toward her children is one issue. Another is the irresponsibility of the physician who took money to impregnate a jobless, husbandless woman with 14 children. His peers and state medical authorities will have to sort that one out. Hiding out there in the weeds, there’s also the issue of the man who reportedly contributed the sperm that helped produce all 14 children. Does he have any responsibility for what happens to them? If not, why not?
Here we confront the complexities that arise when people assume that because something can be done, it should be done. The fact of the matter is that decisions about reproduction and child-rearing quite properly occur in a zone of privacy. It is, however, an abuse of the mutual respect we extend to each other to behave as if decisions made in private have no impact beyond the bedroom door — or, in this case, the door of the doctor’s office.
The Suleman case is a caricature of the issues raised by contemporary fertility medicine, but sometimes a cartoon brings discomforting truths into high relief. One of them is that the novel, perplexing and often unhappy demands that situations such as Suleman’s make on our legal, ethical and social consciences aren’t really a matter of necessity, but of choice. That choice is an outgrowth of the narcissism that has become our society’s background noise.
When the Nadya Sulemans of the world say, as she has in interviews, that they undergo these extreme, invasive, unpleasant, uncertain and expensive medical procedures because they “want children,” that isn’t really the case. If what people want is children — and the incomparable experience of parenthood — there are tens of thousands of children in our country and perhaps millions more abroad waiting for adoption. Thousands of others in our country are waiting for foster care.
The impulse that has made fertility medicine such a large and lucrative specialty in American medicine is about something other than children; it’s about the narcissistic assumption that one is “entitled” to “the experience” of childbearing and, more to the point, the notion that, somehow, if your particular strands of DNA don’t live on into another generation, the species will be poorer for it.
That sense of entitlement and its enabling delusion are about a lot of things — but none of them really involve children.
This sense of entitlement certainly does involve children, none of whom had a choice in this matter. And how can we turn our backs on them when we want to turn our backs on their mother? We can’t. We don’t turn our backs on innocent children in our society, no matter how despicable their parents are.
It’s pretty certain that taxpayers will bear the brunt of Suleman’s excesses. As a San Francisco Chronicle article points out:
A big share of the financial burden of raising Nadya Suleman’s 14 children could fall on the shoulders of California’s taxpayers, compounding the public furor in a state already billions of dollars in the red.
Even before the 33-year-old single, unemployed mother gave birth to octuplets last month, she had been caring for her six other children with the help of $490 a month in food stamps, plus Social Security disability payments for three of the youngsters. The public aid will almost certainly be increased with the new additions to her family.
Also, the hospital where the octuplets are expected to spend seven to 12 weeks has requested reimbursement from Medi-Cal, the state’s Medicaid program, for care of the premature babies, according to the Los Angeles Times. The cost has not been disclosed.
[snip]
Suleman, whose six older children range in age from 2 to 7, said three of them receive disability payments. She said one is autistic, but she has not disclosed the other youngsters’ disabilities, and refused to say how much they get in payments.
In California, a low-income family can receive Social Security payments of up to $793 a month for each disabled child. Three children would amount to $2,379.
The Suleman octuplets’ medical costs have not been disclosed, but in 2006, the average cost for a premature baby’s hospital stay in California was $164,273, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Eight times that is more than $1.3 million, and the average cost for just one cesarean birth in 2006 was $22,762 in California.
For a single mother, the cost of raising 14 children through age 17 ranges from $1.3 million to $2.7 million, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
I’d go with the higher number. At least two (possibly three) of these kids are already disabled; it’s certain the some of the octuplets will have some serious problems as they grow up.
As the LA Times article noted, decisions about fertility treatments are rightly left between doctor and patient and the patients’ families. The doctor had a duty here, though, to say “Enough!” and stop this serial mom. He didn’t.
I don’t know what the answers are here, for this woman and her children. Should the state step in, remove the children, and place them in foster care? Some think that’s the best option, after all the state will pay for this mess one way or another.
It’s for certain that Suleman needs a lot of help. She’s going to need help to raise these kids, and she also needs some counseling herself. I’m not a doctor and I can’t say whether or not she’s mentally ill. But I can certainly see that something isn’t right with her, that there’s something unhealthy here. I hope she gets the help she needs.
As I said in my previous post, I get it. I get the need to have children. But this is indeed grotesque and excessive.
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