Octuplets: Are you kidding?!

This source of intellectual commentary usually eschews popular tabloid fodder like, "Greed Crazed Fertility Doctor Assists Single Mother in Having Fourteen Children". But, that's exactly what this post is about. It was too tempting to pass up. By now we've all read about the woman who had octuplets and (Oh yeah) already had six other children. It turns out she was single and living with her mother.

I don't know much about this mother of octuplets. It is kind of being kept hush hush but apparently her own mother has said her daughter is obsessed with having babies. For goodness sake; there are over six billion people on this planet eating it up and heating it up. Why should we not be aghast that a woman wants to have fourteen children by extraordinary methods? OK, I don't know the whole story. Maybe she is an Olympic athlete with an IQ of 180, the beauty of Cleopatra, and assets of 20 million bucks to birth her exceptional babies, raise them, and educate them. Maybe her genes are just so fabulous they need to be spread for the betterment of the human race. But, I doubt it.

This blessed multiple birth event has led to some criticism of the fertility medical practitioner community. They have responded with "Who us? Why should we question a woman's personal choice about what to do with her body and her life?" I don't buy that. Doctors see all kinds of people. Many are mentally disturbed, poorly educated, suffering from various obsessions, and incapable of acting in their own best interest. Johnny's Rants believes unequivocally that doctors have absolute responsibility to not exploit these people by cutting on their bodies, impregnating them, or anything else that takes away their money and/or alters their mind or body in a way contrary to their best interest. See also my sensitive essay on exploitive cosmetic elective surgery, Coping with Cleavage.

Greedy plastic surgeons exploiting persons of low self-esteem may be the poster child of the medical profession sliding from Hippocratic ethics to gutter grubbing. However, exploitive fertility doctors can take it to another level. Making babies grow inside women with insufficient means of supporting them is not only a violation of the mothers' wellbeing but also the wellbeing of the babies and the tax payers who will have to pick up the tab for a lot of food, shelter, medical care and public education. I read one article that alleged that just the prenatal care, birthing, and postnatal care of these octuplets is costing $400,000 PER BABY. If I help a vulnerable woman make babies by personally donating sperm cells (you know in the traditional manner between the sheets) the law will hold me financially responsible for helping to support the resulting babies. Why should we not also hold a fertility doctor financially responsible for his complicity in making babies with a woman obviously unable to sufficiently support those babies through their upbringing and education to independent adults?!