If news reports are accurate, the eight NEW babies were also conceived via some sort of fertility treatment. She is apparently able to afford the treatment because she works at an fertility clinic (all the women who work at my daughter’s orthodontist’s office have beautiful teeth… because they work for an ortho. It’s clearly a job benefit.)
Although most people think of IVF when they hear about higher-order multiples (quads, quints, etc), in fact most of the "supertwins" born today are actually conceived as the result of fertility drug stimulation - without appropriate monitoring during the woman's cycle.. For example, the Gosselin sextuplets ("Jon and Kate Plus Eight") were the result of fertility drugs. IVF actually reduces the risk of these dangerous higher order births because you can’t give birth to more babies than are implanted. So if three embryos are implanted, you cannot have more than three babies, but you are far more likely to have only one or two babies.(NOTE: there are cases where one fertilized egg splits into two after the procedure, but this is pretty unusual.) Twin or triplet pregnancies certainly carry some risks for mother and babies, but they aren't even in the same stratosphere as the issues presented when a woman carries four or more babies.
So if this woman had the octuplets via IVF, it means some mad scientist - and that’s a mild way of putting it - implanted far too many embryos. This is beyond unethical under any circumstance. If she had them via fertility drugs, it means the doctor wasn’t monitoring her carefully enough, because no good doctor would proceed with treatment for that month if he/she saw that multiples of eggs were ready to go. That month’s treatment cycle would be canceled. Either way, the doctor should be ashamed.
Ths sad thing is that this psychologically vulnerable patient (read the articles to which I link in the first line above; her own mother says she has notable mental health problems) was able to connect with a one-in-a-million crazy doctor, and get him/her to conduct this experiment on her body, creating eight medically fragile human beings. It was the perfect storm of unethical medical care.
I believe strongly that women themselves should decide how many children they have - or don’t have. I myself am the mother of four children - and I would very much like to have a fifth. To many people, that is simply Too Many Kids (and they don't mind telling me that). But as I've written before, I believe reproductive freedom goes both ways, both in the choice NOT to bear a child and in the choice to bear more than the statistically acceptable number of children. That is a personal choice. And there are certainly many families with more than 10 children who are happy, loving and stable. However, the circumstances in this case appear to point to a woman who is already unable to care for the large family she has, and who will now have eight more young children, many or most of whom will have special needs, because higher order multiples are often born with serious health and developmental problems.
Sadly, this story also makes the whole field of assisted reproduction look bad, which is unfortunate, since this case is as much of an outlier in the way reputable fertility treatment is conducted as if a transplant phsyician had decided to graft an extra arm onto one of his patients. It’s THAT “out there.” Most fertility doctors are highly ethical, caring people who love their work helping healthy families have healthy babies.
But yeah, now this woman has 14 children under the age of six, and given the bad PR she is now getting, NO ONE is going to help her. There will be no reality TV show. There won’t even be any free diapers or formula. I cannot even imagine how horribly this situation is going to end for the children or their mother. I hope this doctor is identified and held accountable via peer review for what he/she has done. It’s evil.
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