I'd like to see fertility treatments done away with. There are more than enough kids needing parents in this world. If you can't combine your genes successfully on your own, then there's probably a reason for that. Plus, fertility treatments seem to turn babies into Big Macs that can be ordered at will "I want one baby, a boy, with no genetic "defects" etc etc". Like the lady in Australia who sues her fertility doc because she got twins and wanted one. Twins happen. All sorts of things just happen, and people who think they're ordering up exactly what they want just can't handle that.

Short of that, I think you should have to undergo a mental health assessment, provide proof of financial ability to raise the kid along with proof of insurance (life and health). And you should have to be married. We know enough about how bad single parents are for kids that there is no excuse for medically intervening to create more.

For consequences, the dr who did this should have to pay a large fine, and lose his liscense. Kaiser should get no money, they got the publicity they wanted out of it. And the kids should be taken away.

I think anyone who intentionally has a child while on welfare or workers comp should have their payments ended immediately. If the kids need care, they should be given to people capable of giving the care. You'll notice I do not say we should have no welfare. We should. It should be short-term to get people on their feet, or longterm for the very few who legitimately can not ever care for themselves. Popping kids out should not be a career choice.

I don't agree with fertility treatments, but because some people abuse them, I don't think we get to take them away from everyone. Also, I wanted a particular breed of dog, and a particularly small dog, so I went to a Yorkshire terrier breeder rather than getting one out of the pound. While, if I wanted kids, I think I would adopt (and I don't want kids), there are people out there who want a "particular breed" of child, and I don't think it's right to prohibit them from that.

That said, I'd love to see some means testing to rule out nutbags like this woman. You should need to be able to provide for children before you're allowed to pump them out like bunnies. I draw the line at allowing others' "personal choices" that you and I are forced to pay for.

Also, I see comparisons to Angelina Jolie that are quite unfair. She and Brad Pitt are married parents with the means to take care of their children without assistance from the rest of us. And the children they have are largely adopted, right? Children who'd have pretty shitty lives but for their being rescued by these two.

I think the jolie-pitts are great. Much like Will rogers and whats-her-name who adopted all those disabled kids with their money. I have no real issue with single women or men adopting. It's a better life than the kid had prior to being adopted.

If you want a particular breed of kid-which really turns my stomach-go adopt it. With hundreds of thousands of kids orphaned the world over, and more for sale by their very poor parents, you can find what you want without lab-creating it.

And even international adoptions cost less than IVF and associated "breed" testing.

As nuts as this woman clearly is, and as negligent as the fertility clinic clearly was, let's not get in a big hurry to start making new laws about under what conditions someone should be allowed to have children. The libertarian in me squirms when people start talking like that. There is already a legal framework in place to investigate and punish the doctor involved. If he had acted ethically, he wouldn't have implanted those embryos, and we wouldn't be having this situation.

This is a clear case of abuse and bad judgement, but laws intended to stop this kind of gross abuse could themselves be abused as well.

There have been politically-motivated "scientific" reports trying to claim conservatism as a mental illness - imagine a democrat-controlled Federal government using that as a basis to not allow registered republicans to receive fertility treatments... that sounds a bit over the top, but these days nothing would surprise me.

Besides, in twenty years we'll need all the young workers we can get to pay down the crushing debt that the Obama (and Bush!) administration has given us.

Hold on there, sparky.

Two things - I don't think anyone's advocating a government office to determine who gets to have kids, just the government refusing to finance the artificial creation thereof.

And, some of us are against fertility treatments entirely. If you cannot produce a baby by natural means, then adopt, or get used to not having a baby. Sorry. You married a guy that shoots blanks? You chose poorly. Throw him back and get another, or no baby for you.

Brian - I know that you are not advocating such a thing; that doesn't mean that somewhere down the line the laws put in place to prevent this sad situation can be twisted to support the creation of just such an office. An administration that takes over the census in an attempt to re-jigger congressional districts to create perpetual democrat control of congress would clearly have little problem with taking childbearing rights away from anyone with a subscription to National Review.

What Coop said.

What I like best about this story is that except for some considerable but not uncommon immaturity, this woman has no special character distortions upon which this horror could be blamed. It's obviously just a part of her feminine nature that's gone out of control, and that part is something that many people who're following the story wouldn't have recognized before. The evil impulse by which this women just gave birth to 8 of 14 fatherless children is the same force that causes many women to have one or three. Suleman's share of the resultant carnage is still very small.

But Suleman's given this impulse a name.

I had 2 kids, 3 years apart; that was hard enough to handle, and I had help. What on earth makes this woman think she can handle 14 on her own, 3 of them special needs kids? All under the age of 9. She can't. She's obviously had help with the first 6. Even her own mother says she's out of her mind! She's bat-shit loco. Personally, I think her doctor needs to be accountable in some way. He never should have let her carry all 8 babies to term. That's just nuts. The whole situation is surreal. o.O

I'm not sure being disabled necessarily means you are physically incapable of bearing children. You could be blind, deaf, mentally disabled, an amputee... and still bear children.

Amy - Pitt and Jolie are not married. They have six kids, three adopted. She does the adopting solo, since most countries won't allow unwed couples to adopt (and she adopted her first long before Pitt was in the picture). I don't know if Pitt's gone on to make his fatherhood official in the U.S. or if it's just that they consider themselves a family.

Brad Pitt adopted all the kids. Their last names are Jolie-Pitt. He adopted them before they had their biological children.

God, it's sad I know that.:)

Brad Pitt adopted all the kids. Their last names are Jolie-Pitt. He adopted them before they had their biological children.

God, it's sad I know that.:)

Sorry about the double post. My laptop is super sensitive.

O, he's officially adopted them. I am chock full of hot couple trivia :)

" He never should have let her carry all 8 babies to term"

Surely you aren't suggesting a forced abortion, are you? I think the idea of not implanting so many (or any) in the first place is obviously the better option. Selective reductions can end up total reductions quite easily.

I'm about to have my 4th kid in less than 5 years. I can not imagine so many at once. Or total.

> My laptop is super sensitive.

Hope it got some flowers this afternoon...

Well, remember my crusade against public schizophrenia?

This is the other side of another issue. I asked, "How many medical resources should you be able to command?" in the prolonging of life. This is the corollary. How many medical resources should you be able to command to conceive?

The sci-fi people have this all figured out, but do you?

Oh, and LOVE the topic line, Amy!

The sperm donor should be legally liable for support. I don't care whether or not they had sex, what difference does that make? Both he and the fertility doctor need to provide child support.

Momof3 (soon to be 4), I didn't mean to imply that the doctor should have forced abortion on the woman, but he surely shouldn't have put 8 eggs at one time into her embryo, knowing that all could/would come to term, should he? I mean, carrying ONE fetus to term can cause problems, but 8? At once? She could have died, and then where would those babies be? Oh yeah, where they are now. A burden on the state.

Like the lady in Australia who sues her fertility doc because she got twins and wanted one.

Actually, momof3.5, she sued the doctor because she specifically told him she wanted no more than one embryo transferred, and he transferred two anyway. Now, she apparently didn't tell him this until *right* before her transfer, which was foolish of her (IMHO), but she did tell him, and he disregarded her wishes. Yeah, I feel sorry for the second kid, but...she's more or less the anti-Nadya Suleman, and I have to give her some credit for that.

Kaiser hospital had plenty of time to transfer Nadya Suleman and her gravid uterus to a county hospital.

And if there were a county hospital around with a crack OB team and a top-notch NICU that would be able to handle seven high-risk preemies all at once with very little notice, I would think this a good idea. Know what? Those types of NICUs aren't very common. They're especially not very common at county hospitals. If Nadya had been at a county hospital, the more likely scenario - assuming all the babies didn't die - would have been even earlier, even sicker babies who would have had to be transferred to the nearest Level III NICU. Which, I am guessing, would be at...Kaiser Permanente.

Look, I understand the impulse to blast Kaiser. Watching a bunch of medical types on TV beaming about having brought into the world eight children who shouldn't have been conceived is highly grating. But Kaiser's only fault was trying to follow its supposed mission while being at the end point of an epic fail. The state that should have stopped Nadya "Ooooh, my aching back!" Suleman from collecting almost $200,000 taxpayer dollars on "disability" failed. The sperm donor who should have thought through his actions failed. The parents who should have stopped enabling their daughter several children ago failed. The doctor who should have thought about the consequences to all parties involved - including to his professional future and reputation! - when transferring embryos failed. And Nadya's failings are too numerous to list. Kaiser was presented by a woman going into her second trimester carrying (they thought) seven fetuses, who was refusing selective termination. The worst-case scenario - 100% dead babies, 100% dead mother of six existing children - was a real possibility. Their real goal was essentially to keep her alive and to keep the percentage of stillborn/short-lived babies under 100%. Instead, they ended up with a live mother, babies who were preemies but not micro-preemies, and one more (live) baby than they expected. I'm not happy that all of this happened, but Kaiser didn't knock her up, and what they pulled off was extraordinary. What they learned probably will benefit other non-litter preemies sooner rather than later - and we have a hell of a lot of preemies in this country for reasons that we don't totally understand. My question is, what the hell was the bankrupt state of California doing handing her easy money in the first place?

I didn't mean to imply that the doctor should have forced abortion on the woman, but he surely shouldn't have put 8 eggs at one time into her embryo, knowing that all could/would come to term, should he?

In my perfect world, the doctor shouldn't have put *any* into her uterus. But, in this real world, yes, he shouldn't have put in six, or eight, or however many he put in. If he were going to do the procedure to begin with, he should have put in one. Or two. Do keep in mind, though, that this will (deservedly!) ruin his career. He seems to have been a terrible fertility specialist to begin with - his success numbers were abysmal, and not because he took on tough cases such as 43-year-old women determined to use their own eggs - but his sense of self-preservation seems to be non-existent.

My fear about this is that we will have new regulations that will make IVF more difficult and expensive...and will thus cause more people to turn to fertility drugs alone. Which is what has produced pretty much all of the hyper-litters in the last, oh, 15 years, since multiple studies confirmed that transferring more than two or three embryos doesn't improve the live birth rate for IVF. Sane doctors like live birth rates. Even insane doctors typically like live birth rates, as live birth rates and doctors' profits tend to be positively correlated. What you'll see if more people choose fertility stimulation over IVF is more chances for overstimulated women to ignore their doctors' frantic warnings and have unprotected sex, because hey, what could it hurt? That's how the set of octuplets in the UK who were stillborn in the fifth month (or so) of pregnancy ended up being conceived. Short of banning fertility drugs altogether (which has worked so well for, y'know, narcotics that can actually kill you), there will be fertility treatments in this country, and I'd really prefer for them to be the ones where doctors have more control, rather than less.

> But Kaiser's only fault was trying
> to follow its supposed mission
> while being at the end point
> of an epic fail.

Very good point. I'd harshed the doctors for the smiling photo too, but that's what we want doctors to do.

And also....

Analysis like Marion's is important to make... No complaints, OK? This is not meant to harsh Marion, her enthusiasm, or her arithmetic, be it personal or social. I'm glad someone's minding the store.

But to those of us never inclined to reproduction, the fascination seems pornographic. That people expend such vast wattage on the topic seems like a whole undercurrent of human misconduct that I'm happy not to be a part of... Outcomes like Suleman's bring no sting of shared responsibility to my heart whatsoever.

Suleman's selfishness seems to have struck a nerve:

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-octuplets15-2009feb15,0,4935931.story

But to those of us never inclined to reproduction, the fascination seems pornographic.

Does it make you feel any better to know that the main reason that I'm so interested in the topic is that I got sucked into reading science fiction at a very early age? This stuff is as close as I can get to all of that in the real world, and it's considerably more interesting than the ill-informed hand-wringing over cloning.

I admit, though, that I don't see this primarily as a reproduction/fertility story. I think it's more about the narcissism, enabling, de facto state-encouraged dependence and lust for fame that are the undersides of our prosperous, bustling age. I sometimes get a bad, bad feeling that I'm living in ancient Rome as it begins the Coliseum years. What scares me about Nadya Suleman isn't that she had eight babies - it's that there are lots of people like that out there who we never hear about because they're slightly smarter or slightly less crazy than she is, and I fear that those people are going to control things one of these days.

Well, again, it's not about harshing you. I'm the one whose tastes are different from those of everyone else.

> it's more about the narcissism,
> enabling, de facto state-
> encouraged dependence and
> lust for fame

That, plus feminine nature. (Sez me.) Put another way: If there was a man out there who fathered 14 kids (and there is, and he wouldn't be too hard to find), gossips would rightly take special meaning about the male mentality from his story, but it wouldn't be as good for media. Twisted femininity makes for better tv show chatter. Remember the woman who cut her husband's unit, or the one who drove into a lake? People find more interest in these than in tales of manly monstrosity, because the dark side of feminine nature has no name. But again, Soleman's done her part to give it one.

That's not an entirely bad thing. When you see blood for what it is, and understand that it flows through your own wrists, the festivities at the Coliseum become a lot less alluring. Once people have been exposed to a few bloody tragedies, the popcorn at the Freddy the 13th films isn't as salty as it was in the teen years.

My BF comes from a family of 13 kids (he was 2nd youngest and he's 53 years old right now). His mom had each child individually, one at a time, no twins, even. But she started in 1943, I believe. Eleven children survive today; one died of luekemia in the 80s, one died of cancer 2 years ago. All of them have reproduced except for one, his younger sister. Not one of them has had more than 4 children, but there are a boatload of nieces and nephews running around! Given the time frame when that family got started, and that the older children were all of an age to help as the younger ones came along, it wasn't such a big deal. (Yes, they are Irish Catholic; no, they weren't the largest family in town - we went to school with a couple of kids from a family of 19.) It wasn't so unusual back then to know children from large families. There are still a few around today, but they're not being born 8 at a time! o.O

Flynne -

That's the thing with large families. If you've got the space, and you have the children one or two at a time, things can be managed.

If you have them eight at a time (or even six) then you need a television show and sponsorships to deal with it.

How long until we have to deal with babies with diaper advertisements printed on their asses to cover the sponsorships of these "celebrity multi-moms"?

DH's mom had 13 bros and sis's. Their dad then left and had 14 or so with another woman. Dh is older than some of his uncles. They were all single births though. I can't imagine it. And all survived.

"Worker's compensation will find a way to disqualify injured workers from TTD payments if they get pregnant while on TTD."

You know its one thing if the disability money is being used for invitro. Its a whole 'nother if you just naturally get pregnant. And lets say its not a back injury but some other thing.

I think basing payments for legitimate injuries on whether or not some one is pregnant is extremely imprudent. Unless the purpose is to let the disability insurers pressure them into abortions like insurance companies try to do with people who have high risk pregnancies.