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The headlines read:
"Octuplets Mom: I was 'Fixated on Having Children"
"Octuplet Doctor Probed For Violations"
"Calif. Octuplets Now Longest-Living Set in the U. S."
"Grandma: Octuplets Mom Obsessed With Having Kids"
Jews have always heard the expression, "Be fruitful and multiply." Rabbi Shmuley Boteach writes that there are four things in America for which there is little forgiveness. The fourth is having too many children. "Looking down at primitives with 'too many' children is one of the least acceptable prejudices in the West." (Boteach has 9 children.)
Several years ago I had the pleasure of hearing Rabbi Boteach speak at the Jericho Jewish Center on Long Island, New York. At that time, I believe, he had six children. He told about using public transportation with his large family. People did NOT say, "Oh, what a beautiful family you have." No, people would look at him and say-- almost with disgust--"Are they ALL yours?"
In 2008, when Shmuley's wife was about to have her 9th child, he found himself pitied and pilloried wherever he went. When people said, "Wow, that's a lot of kids," he said it's a shame that he didn't reply, "eight antique cars, or better, eight homes around the world, for which I would have been thought a success. But eight kids? That proves you're either a religious kook or someone ruining the environment by overpopulating the earth."
Kate Zernike ("And Baby Makes How Many", New York Times, 2/8/09) quotes Kim Gunnip, who has 12 children. When asked at a Sears store, "Are these all yours?" she replied, "No. I picked some up at the food court."
And now we have the story of 33-year-old Nadya Suleman, who has given birth to octuplets with the help of in vitro fertilizations. These children, plus the six other children she already has, were conceived at the West Coast IVF Clinic in Beverly Hills, CA. (Her older children range in age between 2 and 7; three are reportedly disabled.) Oh, Ms. Suleman is single, lives with her mother, and has no visible means of support. She is receiving $490 a month in food stamps and federal assistance for her disabled children. Ms. Suleman is open to accepting gifts for the children. (Ah, here's where the sponsorship comes in!)
BTW, Kaiser gathered 46 doctors, nurses, and other medical professionals together to perform the delivery. It's unclear how much that cost and who will pay. If the octuplets stay in the hospital for seven weeks, the cost would be about $469,6l6. If they stay 12 weeks, the cost would be about $805,056.
Suleman told NBC that she planned to go back to Cal State Fullerton for a degree in counseling Once she receives the degree, she says she will get a job and be able to financially support the children.
Are there not some ethical questions that would have to be asked? Why would Dr. Michael Kamrava have implanted that many eggs?
Being a mother is so much more than just giving birth. It also involves providing for the children emotionally and financially. Perhaps Ms. Suleman--and Dr. Kamrava-- need a dose of reality...or "seykhl."
Barbara Bush ("Reflections - Life After the White House") describes a trip she made to an orphanage in Bucharist, Romania:
"Under the Ceausescus, the government encouraged families to produce many children in order to create a pool of labor for the state. Many of them were sent to orphanages, with the understanding that the parents would retrieve them at some later date. As most of the parents were unable to feed what children they already had, these children, supposedly on loan and therefore not able to be adopted by anyone else, languished in orphanages till they reached the age when they could be useful to the state. At that point they became the slaves of the government undertaking such efforts as the Ceausescus felt necessary...
The children I was taken to visit were the youngest, those not yet walking. Some of them were tiny infants in cribs, perhaps a dozen or so, lined up in a long, dimly lit corrodor. A woman whom I judged to be a nurse (although she fell far short of our image of the kindly, clean, and caring nuses of our experience), wearing a dingy, spotted apron and a martyred, sour, sour, bordering-on-anger expression on her face, trudged from crib to crib, bending over just far enough to place the nipple of the bottle in each tiny mouth. Not for one second during the entire process did a human hand make a contact with a baby. When I asked why the babies weren't held by a nurse while being fed, the doctor who accompanied me said that this was an unskilled nurse who knew no better. But I noticed he made no comment to the nurse. I also subsequently learned that the neglect was intentional, because the thinking was that once you picked up the baby, he might want to be picked up again, and that would be all together too time- consuming.
As I became more aware of my surroundings, I realized how unnaturally quiet it was in that corridor, despite the presence of so many babies. I also noticed how dull-eyed and listless the babies were. They looked like little shriveled old men. Something I learned in my psychology class long ago came back to me, and I realized for the first time, first hand, the tragic results of the withholding of love."
______________________
Marjorie Gottlieb Wolfe is the mother of
3 adult sons. She agree with Barbara Bush:
"Like an unwatered plant, a baby denied love and attention shrivels in its
absence
and could even die from lack of it, even if he
is adequately fed.
Are you listening Ms. Suleman AND Dr. Michael Kamrava?
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