From the AP wire:
LOS ANGELES – Police said Thursday they will investigate death threats against octuplet mom Nadya Suleman and advise her publicist on how to handle a torrent of other nasty messages that have flooded his office.
Word that the 33-year-old single, unemployed mother is receiving public assistance to care for the 14 children she conceived through in vitro fertilization has stoked furor among many people.
Police Lt. John Romero said officers were meeting with Suleman’s publicist Mike Furtney about the flood of angry phone calls and e-mail messages against Suleman, her children and Furtney.
“We are aware of the media accounts of the threats, and that they are being sent to the West Los Angeles detectives for appropriate action,” Romero said.
Furtney said 500 new e-mails were received early Thursday.
The logic here is impeccable. I don’t like the fact that I will have to indirectly help pay to take care of this woman’s children. Therefore, I will kill her, necessitating several foster parents, and thus HEIGHTEN the cost to the state, which I will still have to help pay.
Kugelmass has it right: this actually has very little to do with who has to pay what and how many kids an unemployed single mother should or shouldn’t have. You don’t get this type of widespread, hyper-violent reaction from a question of economics – not even, I would argue, from people disgusted with the Wall Street bailouts. No, this is about “the worship of motherhood and the hatred of mothers.” And I don’t think you can have one without the other.
(Cross-posted at Modern Mitzvot.)
I was introduced to this topic by my chiropractor’s receptionist back a couple of weeks ago, the day or day after the babies were born. She, the receptionist, was livid, absolutely LIVID that Ms. Suleman dared to have 8 babies at the same time and lampooned her (the mother’s) surprise at having 8 (instead of the expected 7). My first reaction was – it’s a miracle all 8 babies were born healthy and able to breath on their own. And it pretty much stayed there.
Why be so pissed off at the mother? If she were married and weathly would that make it all better? Probably not, as people still, insanely IMO, feel fine about passing judgement on how, and how many, people choose to bring children into the world (or not, which is a whole other thread).
“No, this is about “the worship of motherhood and the hatred of mothers.” And I don’t think you can have one without the other.”
Thanks for the quote from Kugelmass, Julie – that pretty much nails it.
In the youtube video interview Ms. Suleman did with an anchorwoman from the Today Show, earlier this week, I saw a very young 33 year old, with designer finger nails longer than I’d recommend for cuddling premee new borns, but that’s as far as I’m gonna go with judging. I think her decisions are her decisions, period, end of sentence.
The hate mail is just, I don’t know. Makes my head hurt. Are all the people sending the e-mails and calling, especially the ones threatening her life, aware of how little Ms. Suleman’s life has to do with their’s?!? It’s just bizarre.
Why be so pissed off at the mother? If she were married and wealthy would that make it all better?
Yes, because then she’d be adorable like Bonnie Hunt or Myrna Loy in “Cheaper by the Dozen,” instead of going into the “welfare mother” box. The level of resentment in this country toward “welfare mothers” made Newt Gingrich Speaker of the House (welfare reform actually was an instance of the GOP shooting itself in the electoral foot, as you’ll notice they don’t campaign on that issue much anymore — foiled by their own success). People might be judgmental about large families, but they generally don’t become really angry unless they’re truly wacked-out fringe environmentalists (“your 14 kids are destroying the planet!”) or wacked-out fringe conservatives (“your 14 kids are raising my taxes!”).
You’re missing that this is retributionary/make-an-example logic. The cost-benefit analysis is not based on how much Suleman’s children will cost to raise, but how much all the Children We Think Shouldn’t Exist could cost to raise unless an example is made of this woman.
One of the secretaries at my office had a reaction similar to the receptionist Eva mentioned, although toned down from livid to annoyed. This secretary (whose family is from Mexico) said that if this woman lived in Mexico, she never would have done this on purpose because the welfare benefits she would get in Mexico wouldn’t be enough to support so many kids.
I’m an assisted reproduction skeptic anyway (OK with egg and sperm selling, but strongly opposed to binding surrogacy contracts and REALLY opposed to human reproductive cloning), because I don’t believe in the great mystical bond of biology and want to adopt my kids if possible. And Ms. Suleman in particular sounds like she has fully bought into “the worship of [biological] motherhood.”
I think there has been a full loss of any public debate or frame on the side effects of having a functional social net.
This whole, my taxes will support her illness and stupidity shouldn’t get special treatment. Do you know how much of my taxes goes to things I don’t support. Government intervention for Wal-Mart, War on Drugs, a bank bailout without oversight amounting to little more than $700 billion of free money, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the bloated military-industrial complex, the various warlords our oil execs are bribing this week. In fact, I’d gladly compare notes on the percentage of my tax bill that goes to programs I don’t like to even blanket categories like welfare and unemployment benefits.
It’s the occasional price one has to pay to live in a society were you won’t be grilled over personal choices to decide whether or not you can afford to eat and have shelter.
Or should we make sure none of the critics have made poor financial decisions, made a really dumb personal choice, took away the rights of a minority because you were afraid your kids could catch it like a disease, or ran a Fortune 500 company?
Also, fully agree on the hatred of mothers thing. I also guarantee its racism and her single nature that’s driving it, especially as she was once a “wealthy minority member”. It’s about punishing “those” women for thinking they can board the bus to fame that’s reserved for properly shackled white women.
I think that hate mail and death threats are way out of line and hope they find and prosecute these people (for the death threats, anyway).
My first reaction when I heard this was “I wonder how she is going to support all those kids?” When I heard about her financial circumstances I wonderd “IVF isn’t cheap – how did she pay for that?”
I don’t care how many kids someone has on an absolute basis. I have an aunt that had 11 kids – one after the other, BTW, no multiple births and no fertility treatments. Good Catholics. My uncle was a plumber and apparently both their plumbing worked fine. Steak dinners were few and far between in that household and what your older brother or sister wore to school this year was what you’d be wearing next year, but they weren’t a charge on the public dole. I do see it as my business how many kids someone has if they expect me to pay for supporting them. People should not have kids that they don’t have the ability to support.
Comparing this to paying taxes for things one opposes – like liberating Iraq, for example – fails on two counts. First, at least in my case this isn’t an issue of opposing having a bunch of kids per se. Secondly, we were represented in those decisions. This woman made her decision to have kids she is planning to take money from me for to support all by herself. I wasn’t represented in that decision, nor were you.
People have an obligation to support their kids. If they can’t support kids, they shouldn’t have them. If they can support their kids, then it’s none of my business how many they have. But there’s enough of a load on the social systems to support kids of people who had reason to expect to do so but were overcome by circumstances beyond their control; death, disease, job loss, etc. Deliberately having kids that you can’t support is an abuse of that system. It’s arrogant and shows contempt for us all. And forget racism – I don’t know what race this woman is.
I understand why people are angry about having to support this parent – she can’t take care the kids she has, but keeps having more and more and MORE! I have that same reaction myself . . . but I can also rationalize it away by thinking of all the other things my government supports against my will that (in reality) I have NO control over.
However, I think that the roots of my dismay are not financial but biological and tribal. If this woman had created a financial mess some other way (say in running a bank into the ground) we would not be nearly so interested in her personal life and all the details of how she jipped us. I don’t think we would be nearly so indignant. I could be wrong (e.g., Madoff).
But I think that a members of a social species we are *wired* to take an interest in the well-being of children (even not our own) and in the minutia of our “tribe-mates'” reproductive and sexual lives. We gossip about who is dating who ad-nauseum, and our politics are filled with controversy about reproductive/sex issues.
And it makes sense from the point of view of thinking about ancestral humans living in small social groups for tens of thousands of years, and having both responsibility for and (ultimately) dependence on all the children of the group . . . as well as a close genetic relationship with the kids (most likely).
(and I also wondered how she paid for it . . . )
I don’t think I buy an evo psych explanation for our prurient interest in this story. There’s a lot we don’t know about our ancient hunter-gatherer predecessors, but given that malnutrition and infanticide were the principal means of family planning, it’s hard to imagine them tsk-tsking over someone having too many kids.
There are legitimate ethical questions here about medical procedures that greatly increase the risk of high-order multiples, who are guaranteed to be born seriously premature, with all the health problems that entails, but they apply equally to wealthy married women and poor single women. We (as a culture, not us here) have spent the last decade or more treating these births with OMG!! So cute!!!! and outpourings of support and corporate sponsorship, and then someone who doesn’t fit the proper model does it and everyone is shocked and appalled.
That people would be so enraged as to send death threats is both horrifying and pathetic.
(And it is a miracle that they were born as healthy and as big as they were. About a month before these babies were born, a good friend’s sister had twins at 31 weeks. I thought her babies were pretty large for 31 weeks and they were the same size as Suleman’s largest baby.)
I wonder if there’s been a large increase in death threats since the Internet became widely used? Used to be, you had to be somebody special to get death threats from all over. Now all you need is a blog…
Sure, and I think that a lot of people who opposed the invasion opposed it because there was no good reason to invade and it was being carried out by an absolute incompetent. It’s not an issue of opposing invading places per se. It’s an issue of this specific invasion, and not feeling like it ought to be our job to foot the bill for Bush’s desire to feel macho for a little bit.
How was that? I didn’t get to vote on it.
… OH! Oh, you meant that our elected representatives were able to make decisions on whether or not to support the war. Huh.
So, then when I read this next part:
I have to wonder what the hell you’re talking about.
We have had at least as much input into how our government manages aid to familes and children as we ever had in regards to the invasion of Iraq, and probably more. I mean, it’s not as if the laws regarding that weren’t written by those same elected representatives.
The point is, that like a lot of conservatives, you think someone else ought to pay for your wars, but that it’s out of line for you to pay for someone else’s children.
And sorry, but no. You don’t really get to have it both ways.
—Myca
Woah, she’s getting all these letters and threats, and the doctor who greenlighted the procedure is not? (This is not to condone death threats. I’m just totally flabbergasted that we have a medical professional in the midst of all this, and he is barely on the sidelines of all the attention this woman is getting.)
All I can hope is that we get off our high horse of commenting about this woman&children, and instead do something about the doctor in question, as well as take a hard look at the regulations around fertility treatments offered in CA. If we don’t like it, then we should engage in something to keep it from happening again.
There’s an infertility blog that I lurk at, and that’s pretty much what they’ve been on about. Who the hell was this doctor? (Not that absolutely no one is judging the mother – but many of them are pissed not because she’s single but because she makes anyone who uses ART look bad, and they’re sick of their friends saying things like “You sure are lucky that didn’t happen to you.”) The guidelines for IVF pretty much everywhere now are such that this kind of thing shouldn’t happen. The doctor has been named now, and it turns out he’s someone with a very poor reputation in those circles, and he claims to have new, ground-breaking techniques that guarantee results, yet, oddly he has one of the worst records at actually getting women pregnant (Suleman aside) that most of these women have ever seen. Yes, I think the doctor needs a look, from the state board if at all possible.
For those who are interested, here’s the article on the doctor.
Welcome to the internet age. Are there any controversial figures out there who _don’t_ receive death threats? As for the doctor:
No Googling. What’s his name?
That’s why he’s not receiving death threats. Every angry screed I’ve seen about this has included comments about how culpable he is, but he’s not in the spotlight so he doesn’t bear the brunt of the ire.
We have had at least as much input into how our government manages aid to familes and children as we ever had in regards to the invasion of Iraq, and probably more. I mean, it’s not as if the laws regarding that weren’t written by those same elected representatives.
I’m not talking about the laws that structure who and how wars or welfare are funded. The decision points here were those where the action was contemplated and executed. They were a) should we invade Iraq and b) should I have IVF? The first was made by a group of elected officials. I certainly questioned it when it happened myself (I wasn’t sure that this wasn’t all about Saddam having tried to kill Bush I), but regardless of that it was made by the people who represent us. Whereas the decision to have these kids was made by the woman who had them.
The point is, that like a lot of conservatives, you think someone else ought to pay for your wars, but that it’s out of line for you to pay for someone else’s children.
Well, it’s not my war, it’s the country’s war. Just like President Obama is my President even though I didn’t vote for him and President Bush was your President even though (I presume) you didn’t vote for him. The common defense is a common decision and thus a common obligation (and is explicitly a function of the Federal government as defined in the Constitution), and both you and I are obliged to pay for it. I don’t know how much taxes you pay, but I probably paid as much for it as you did, if not more. OTOH, children are an individual decision and supporting them is an individual obligation. Also, paying to support someone else’s children is nowhere prescribed in the Constitution and forcing people to do it is hardly the role the Federal government should be taking.
I limited the number of children I had so that I could support them properly. Why, then, should someone else be able to make an individual decision that takes money out of my pocket to support their kids that they knew they couldn’t support when they conceived them?
Ron, the money that “comes out of your pocket” is not going to increase, not even if you live near her. That is not how public funding works. One possible number I saw for how much her family would cost to raise is $1.3 million. How many taxpayers are there in California? I’m willing to bet that there are enough taxpayers in the state of CA alone that her particular case wouldn’t even cost a full dollar per taxpayer. The “OMG welfare queen be stealin my monies!!!!1!!1!” is a bullshit argument.
Some of these comments confuse me utterly.
First of all, we have no hard evidence that Suleman is receiving public support. As far as I know, that line of argument is entirely based on rumors. The circumstantial evidence suggests otherwise, as I do not know many people on welfare who can afford expensive fertility treatments at a private HMO like Kaiser-Permanente.
Second, as I write in my post, you can’t understand Suleman’s position without understanding its connection to anti-abortion dogma. It’s not that she wanted precisely fourteen children; it’s that she didn’t want to destroy any of the fertilized embryos. That is perfectly consistent with the argument that a fertilized embryo is a human person with human rights, and (so this line of reasoning goes) being unable to afford the child is no justification for murder.
Third, I absolutely reject the notion that doctors should have the authority to decide when a mother has had enough children. Doctors are there to assist with medical procedures and to determine medical needs; it is not their job to enforce family planning.
Finally, while it is true that a child is a significant financial burden, a child is never a cost borne entirely by the parents, any more than anybody in America is a “self-made” man (or woman). Public funding paves the roads — that is one example out of thousands. Furthermore, it is an unavoidable reality that other people’s bad decisions are the price of freedom. It would be a great boon for our nation if nobody ever drank to excess, but from our perspective, it is better to pay those costs than to try another Prohibition. The same goes for reproductive rights and reproductive freedom.
Dori,
Except if that costs $1.3 million, that’s $1.3 million that isn’t getting spent on, say, merit scholarships to CalTech or whatever RonF might be willing to support. We live in a world of limited resources, which is why *I* get pissed about the money spent in Iraq that just plain vanished out of incompetence and corruption. It’s only a few bucks out of my individual pocket, but it’s still money that could have been used for something productive. You seem to be saying that so long as the cost is diffused over a large enough population, no one in that population has any right to ask for accountability. While this is true for all taxpayer expenditures in a legal sense (i.e. I don’t have standing in a court to demand a proper audit of Iraq spending), it’s not true in a moral or political sense.
UPDATE: Also, the $1.3 million figure is kind of bullshit. The hospital bills alone will be about that much.
As for the idea of some categorical hatred of WOC who have babies, I don’t buy that either; while there were some conservatives who were negative about an African immigrant family in Houston that had octuplets when they already had one child, the general attitude was “what a miracle!” They got a house from Fannie Mae and a big van from Ford, as well as other donations, and are now quite self-sufficient.
Again, PG, thats not how public funding works. Different funds are allocated before they are distributed, or are collected with a specific purpose in mind. I am not suggesting that there should be no accountability as to how tax dollars are spent, but that this obnoxious chest beating about how this one person is responsible for taking money from an individual is a flawed argument that betrays a lack of understanding of how public funds function.
Also, the fact that she is both a brown woman and SINGLE is most likely what perpetrates the Regan-esque Welfare Queen stereotype. Boiling these situations down to a single variable is effectively being purposely obtuse.
Again, PG, thats not how public funding works. Different funds are allocated before they are distributed, or are collected with a specific purpose in mind. I am not suggesting that there should be no accountability as to how tax dollars are spent, but that this obnoxious chest beating about how this one person is responsible for taking money from an individual is a flawed argument that betrays a lack of understanding of how public funds function.
Sure, but you don’t seem to be addressing how entitlement spending works. There is no way for the government to say, “This person has been irresponsible in her reproductive decisions and therefore we won’t support her.” EVERY person in Ms. Suleman’s circumstances is legally entitled to the same public support. (And this is as it should be, lest bureaucrats punish people they don’t like by arbitrarily denying them assistance.)
Therefore, the responsibility to wisely use that entitlement devolves to the individual. That’s why, instead of ranting against the welfare laws generally, people are ranting against this woman individually: she is perceived to have failed in her individual responsibility to the community. We have established a communal fund for those who are in need; she is perceived to have made herself much more needy out of a desire to have more and more children. I haven’t seen or heard anyone express antagonism toward the children themselves — the general attitude seems to be pity.
Also, the fact that she is both a brown woman and SINGLE is most likely what perpetrates the Regan-esque Welfare Queen stereotype. Boiling these situations down to a single variable is effectively being purposely obtuse.
Except that being single is a meaningful factor in one’s ability to provide financial and other forms of support for oneself and one’s offspring. Being more concerned about a single person’s ability to do these things is not invidious discrimination; being more concerned about a brown or female person’s ability to do these things is.
Joseph,
First of all, we have no hard evidence that Suleman is receiving public support. As far as I know, that line of argument is entirely based on rumors. The circumstantial evidence suggests otherwise, as I do not know many people on welfare who can afford expensive fertility treatments at a private HMO like Kaiser-Permanente.
Suleman has been on disability payments for herself since 2001, receives disability payments for three of her prior children, and is on food stamps. She had suffered permanent damage to the lumbar area of her spine that could become more painful “with heavy lifting, repetitive bending, prolonged sitting, standing or walking,” and 10% of her injury at the time of her assessment was attributed to her pregnancy at that time with a single fetus, which obviously would put further strain on her back. I have no idea how much strain an 8-fetus pregnancy puts on a back.
Second, as I write in my post, you can’t understand Suleman’s position without understanding its connection to anti-abortion dogma. It’s not that she wanted precisely fourteen children; it’s that she didn’t want to destroy any of the fertilized embryos. That is perfectly consistent with the argument that a fertilized embryo is a human person with human rights, and (so this line of reasoning goes) being unable to afford the child is no justification for murder.
I agree that this has to do with anti-abortion dogma, but people who are really concerned about the possibility of having some embryos dying generally don’t create a lot of embryos in the first place. Inevitably, every embryo you create either will live to become a person, or will die in the womb. If you create 12 embryos, you’re setting yourself up either to have 12+ kids or some dead embryos. If I thought an embryo in a petri dish was a human being, I wouldn’t make a whole bunch of them for my convenience in getting pregnant unless I was ready to give birth to all of them.
Third, I absolutely reject the notion that doctors should have the authority to decide when a mother has had enough children. Doctors are there to assist with medical procedures and to determine medical needs; it is not their job to enforce family planning.
Agreed, but it is doctors’ job to decide which medical procedures are too dangerous to mother or child to be performed. There is no binding regulation on the number of embryos that can be transferred at one time, but guidelines advise against implanting more than two at a time in a woman Ms. Suleman’s age. Her pre-existing disability from her back problem creates an additional concern that is absolutely a doctor’s business. Doctors are not just retailers of medical services; they have a professional ethical obligation not to perform procedures that are bad for a patient’s health, even if the patient requests them. This is why most doctors refuse to do cosmetic amputations.
Medically speaking, giving birth to eight babies is generally ill advised. A doctor would easily be justified in having an opinion on it and/or incorporating that opinion into both their recommendations and what they were willing to do.
PG, Sailorman, you’re confusing the issues at hand.
Let’s not play doctor. Whether or not you (or WebMD, or whoever) think that Ms. Suleman’s age or back condition made the procedure inadvisable, obviously this doctor disagreed, and the results are not in your favor. Both the mother and the children are healthy. This strikes me as a case of looking for a good reason (the mother’s poor ailing back!) that can work as a substitute for the real reason, which is that we don’t think she should have so many kids.
As for the number of embryos, again, let’s not make a habit of making other people’s bodies our business. Presumably Suleman had no way of knowing how many of those embryos would live, and didn’t want to go through the fertilization procedures multiple times.
Finally, if Ms. Suleman receives disability payments for a bad back, then that is her right. That’s not getting paid to have kids, which is what most people blame her for. Nor does a bad back disqualify someone from becoming a mother, or from having a family of a certain size. What, people with bad backs can have 2 children only, but Ms. Henderson down the way can have 5?
Uh, Joseph, why do you assume that people who find this problematic are just “playing” doctor? I’ve talked about this with three family members and two friends who are practicing physicians, and none of them thought this sounded advisable. Can you find a single physician in the various media reports who thinks an eight fetus pregnancy is good for mother or children? The fact that they all survived thus far does not mean they’re all healthy — “healthy” children don’t spend weeks in the hospital (indeed, even a C-section delivery will get trundled out of the hospital after three days). The fact that a single doctor was willing to do this doesn’t mean it in any way comports with medical standards — have you ever heard of malpractice?
As for the number of embryos, again, let’s not make a habit of making other people’s bodies our business. Presumably Suleman had no way of knowing how many of those embryos would live, and didn’t want to go through the fertilization procedures multiple times.
I’m not making her body my business; I’m questioning her judgment and that of her physician, and hoping that this will be taken by the public as a sign that we need binding laws on reproductive clinics, which currently operate with very little regulation. (Having majored in bioethics and then worked in health care, I do know a teeny tiny bit about this.) Abortion clinics aren’t run as a free-for-all where doctors act without professional judgment on the whims of patients; why should reproductive clinics be run that way, just because the public is more sympathetic to people who want to bear children than people who don’t?
I agree that Suleman had no idea how many of the embryos would live. How does that negate my statement that by creating 12 embryos, she set herself up to have 12+ kids or some number of dead embryos? There cannot be death without first making life. If she didn’t want to deal with the fertilization procedures multiple times, then she deliberately made a choice in favor of risking the well-being of the resulting children instead.
Suleman’s back isn’t merely “bad” like my uncle’s back is bad after years of carrying the old, heavy laptops on his back; her back is impaired enough that she qualifies to receive disability payments (which my uncle almost certainly doesn’t, as he’s able to continue working; he just can’t lift heavy things anymore — thankfully his back didn’t go out on him until his two kids were old enough that they didn’t need to be carried anymore). If someone’s back is that severely impaired, 20 lbs. of just baby weight (never mind the additional weight gain of a healthy pregnancy) would take a serious toll.
Actually, the outcome is irrelevant to the issue of whether it was a statistically/medically good choice at the time.* Which is why I used the term “generally.” It appears that experts in that field do not believe the procedure to have been medically appropriate. That it happens to have worked out “OK”** doesn’t change that.
*If I agree to pay you $3 if a coin comes up heads but you only need to pay me $2 if it comes up tails, it’s a good bet to have made even if you end up losing. If you put pressure on my artery to stem bleeding from a cut and you happen to cause me to die because of some rare and previously unknown arterial fault, you still did the right thing by putting pressure on the artery.
**It’s not actually clear how well it worked out and it may not be appropriate to say “mother and infants are healthy.” Health is a bit of a relative term. Her choice to have octuplets almost certainly resulted in the infants being less healthy than they would have been had there been fewer than eight. Two pound infants are fairly high risk, all things being considered.
Joseph Kugelmass,
I really, really appreciate your comments on this situations. They’ve been wonderful to read, here and on your blog.
Also, Joseph, what is your basis for declaring that her receipt of public support is merely based on “rumors”? Obviously the NYT and the rest of the media have been known to get their facts wrong, but every mainstream media outlet has been consistent in the last few days on stating that “Ms. Suleman, 33, was unemployed, had recently declared bankruptcy, and was receiving food stamps and disability checks while living at home with her parents and her six other children.” You seem to be the one who is writing without researching, while declaring that others are uninformed.
Keep it civil, people.
Joseph:
Furthermore, it is an unavoidable reality that other people’s bad decisions are the price of freedom.
Bad decisions are the price of freedom, I agree. But freedom and responsibility go hand in hand. PG expressed it quite well. The obligation to suffer the consequences of bad decisions lies with the decision-maker, not with the rest of us. It is the ducking of that obligation in the name of self-gratification that shows the arrogant contempt this woman has for the rest of us.
The same goes for reproductive rights and reproductive freedom.
How are reproductive rights and freedom at issue here? I have not proposed that people be forcibly restrained from acting as she has. The physician in this case may have acted medically unethically but not illegally as far as I can see – although had there been a different outcome I’m sure the accusations would have sounded much more strongly, especially by her heirs and their legal representation.
Well, see, in Canada, you wouldn’t even see such a bill, and taxes wouldn’t get higher for it either.
The basic governmental plan for someone (Canadian citizen) in Quebec province without insurance covers 69% of medicament costs, as well as 100% of hospitalization costs.
Welfare covers 100% of medicaments as well as dental work after a year and vision exams after two years. Though its far below a Basic Income as discussed in the other thread (565$ a month, penalty of 100$ for living with parents on top – when just the rent of a single person apartment runs around 400$, without food, cable, phone or anything else).
Disability benefits can give 275$ more than welfare a month, but it must be proven to be permanent or last more than two years. Even that is less than minimum wage. 565+275 = 840$/month net, which implies 210$ a week. A 40 hours job at 8.50$/hour will net you about 250$-275$ net (and yes 8.50$ is minimal wage here, will be 9.00$ in 3 months and 10.25$ in May 2011).
I’m not sure how she could raise 14 kids with that little money however. Even with help from the parents, she would stand to need LOTs of help. Foodstamps sure help some, getting your monthly food bill down…but for 15 people, even considering 8 being newborns?
I also know that welfare and no doubt disability benefits pay you less if you work (you’re basically allowed 200$ a month before they reduce your amount dollar for dollar, down to zero). Not to mention being considered on disability is considered binding somewhere as preventing you to find work.
I know a friend who was forcefully put on disability by her mother in order for her mother to control her into adulthood (prevent her from working). I’m not sure what is the nature of the disability or if it ever was legitimate, but the motive of the mother is to prevent the woman from having the funds to transition to female. I’d never heard of it before, so I don’t know if it’s common at all.
Oh and yeah, even considering “Canada has high taxes”, my rough pay for 63 hours was 600.00$ exactly. I went home with 538$ (for 2 weeks). So I don’t think it’s all that bad to have universal healthcare. I have no insurance whatsoever at work, and am very unlikely to ever get any (permanence is very hard to get if possible at all), so I don’t want a 5000$ bill if I break my leg.
Even if I might never get children myself (bio or adopted), I still wouldn’t be against financing people like this woman through disability benefits or welfare.
Thank you for the web site. I want to share my view and appreciate your making it possible for me to do so.
The children whom Nadya has born will hopefully go on to live wonderful lives and become productive citizens in our society.
However, the possibility disabilities strike in her newborn is quite high. That is almost certain for the babies under 2 pounds. The challenge disabled children face is difficult, even if Nady says it is a blessing.
This woman brought life to the world in a form and on a stage that is bizarre. And the more I listen to her speak, the more I realize she has a personality disorder that could lead to her inability to work in a setting to earn a living sufficient to raise 14 kids. Unless she gets extensive psychotherapy and finally is able to conclude her self-created blessing was all about her. In the meantime, I hope her friends and relatives come to the kid’s aid as they will need lots of love and encouragement with their schooling.
If this is in response to my comment:
In my comment, I am trying to point out the discrepancy in sending death threats to the mother but to no one else who is involved. Then, I try to put out an idea of what would be more effective and responsible than sending death threats to anybody. I’m not talking about doctor’s authority because it is off scope (to my mind). I’m talking about where people are placing their anger. Why are people angry with the mother but not the doctor?
Unrelatedly, in regard to your comment:
I agree that, as I understand fertility clinics to this day, it is not in a fertility doctor’s scope to care about family planning beyond a client’s concerns and health. Regardless, advocating for a peer review of the medical procedures that were done is entirely reasonable. Publicly, there appears to be a peer consensus that what this doctor did was medically irresponsible. So, let the medical field review what occurred. Better than death threats, certainly.
Similarly, there may be a public call to make family planning part of a fertility treatment center’s concern. That is an issue certainly worth discussing, and as I see it, it is the heart of your concern in this paragraph. Personally, I am uncomfortable discussing that thought at length in a thread about death threats and anger toward an individual, and will cut this off with a suggestion to create a thread for this concern.
RonF says that people shouldn’t have children they can’t support. I’d be inclined to agree, except that peeling back even a couple of layers reveals a thorny thicket of ethical issues: personal decisions that burden society aren’t as clear-cut as they may seem.
From time to time my town has the opportunity to buy land rather than let it be developed, which will involve a property-tax override. The issue is always contentious, and someone always points out that although passing the override will raise our taxes now, letting a developer buy the land will raise them later, because a family with two kids in public school costs more than it pays in taxes, assuming a house of ordinary size and value. A family that moves in with two or three kids under six and moves out as soon as the last one leaves high school could be said to burden society (and is in fact said to by the local antitax gadflies, although they don’t point fingers at specific families).
Or again, should a woman who learns that the child she is carrying will be severely disabled terminate the pregnancy to avoid burdening society?
As an American living a fairly normal American life, with a nice job and a nice house and a computer (actually more than one) I can use to post this comment, am I burdening society by consuming more than my fair share of natural resources?
Not so simple.
Personally, I am upset by the actions of the fertility doc, and not much by Suleman. Sure, I wouldn’t make the same decisions as she did. Her idea of responsible parent is not the same as mine, but that is not a crime or a reason to hate.
What the doc did is inexcusable, though. Implanting 6 embryos, when the guidelines for a 33 year old woman who has undergone successful cycles is the height of irresponsibility. It won’t be possible to know if the kids are “healthy” for 8 years or so. Anecdotally, I know a “healthy” preemie, who missed no milestones until age 2. Now at age 3 she still doesn’t talk.
For lots and lots of info about “healthy” preemies and their development issues, see The Preemie Experiment, a blog about the impacts prematurity has on development, beyond “they can breathe on their own”, which is all the docs have said about the octuplets. The smaller the baby, the bigger the risk of issues. Not to mention the risks to Suleman’s health–sudden, catastrophic heart failure due to the strain of all the extra fluid is just one of the known risks beyond the back issues and preemie issues. It was the docs’ job to “first do no harm”. Just because it looks like an OK decision now doesn’t mean that the more likely outcome wasn’t more like this.
@JaneDoh
It looks like you cut-off your sentence here:
You don’t say what the guidelines/standards of care are.
By the way, I’m very much against SoCs of any kind being taken as law. Though as it should be taken on a case-by-case basis, it was really a mistake on the part of the doctor.
SoCs being taken as binding almost as if it was law is what led to the trial against that UK doctor because he prescribed hormones to trans people under 3 months. It’s a guideline, and it’s meant to be variable on a case-by-case basis. I think the obsession on making guidelines binding is misplaced. Medicine should be tailored to individual patient needs, not cookie-cutter molds. Many docs take it as law and don’t prescribe under 12 weekly sessions. Just because they can.
Though I agree implanting more than 2-3 embryos at once is more than a little senseless. That’s not evading the guidelines as much as irresponsability and unnecessarily causing harm to the patient.
A word about language. Generally speaking, doctors don’t “implant” embryos. They transfer them, and sometimes they implant and sometimes they don’t. This particular doctor is claiming to have a new technique for directly implanting the embryos, but no one knows at this point whether that’s true or he’s just blowing smoke. It might seem a small thing, but it drives a lot of people who have struggled with infertility up the wall to hear people talking about “implanting embryos.” If doctors really could implant embryos, IVF would have a higher success rate.
I wouldn’t want standard of care to become law, either. Too many bad things could come of it, not just in infertility treatment but in any doctor-patient relationship. That doesn’t mean the doctor acted responsibly here. I don’t have to act like this was a neutral decision from a medical standpoint to agree that Suleman had the right to undergo this procedure (or to agree that the price of freedom is that some people will make bad decisions). I disagree that it would have been improper interference in her family planning decisions for a doctor to decline to transfer that many embryos. The medical question here has nothing to do with the total number of children she has or would have.
Which gets me back around to disagreeing with the comparison RonF is making to people who have very large families one kid at a time (or even with a set of twins or two thrown in). No one who has high-order multiples can support them on their own. There’s the millions in NICU costs. Even if they have insurance, they’ll drag up the premiums for everyone else in their group. There’s the impossibility of caring for them alone during their infancy. They’re all the same age, so there’s no hand-me-downs and no older children to help care for the youngest ones. The socially acceptable people who have had high-order multiples have received help from donors, corporate sponsors, inviting television cameras into their lives. But if they hadn’t, I suspect we would see many of them also getting public assistance in some form, at least in the beginning. They might have made too much money for assistance in the beginning, but that would have changed pretty quickly.
I suppose we could say Suleman should have understood that people would recoil from her, even though people had embraced every other person who made the exact same decisions she did, but she’s not fundamentally different from them.
She’s not my daughter, my sister, my friend. Her decisions just don’t affect me – or any of the people getting so upset – to the point that this level of anger and rage at her is explained merely by the irresponsibility of her actions.
I believe the standard of care is no more than two embryos in a woman her age, particularly given that she had had successful pregnancies in the past, meaning there was a very high likelihood of many of the embryos taking. With older women, it’s three. The main reason to break that standard of care is if the woman has had multiple failed attempts.
@Schala
Oops–that is what happens when your 2 year old “helps” you type. :-) I meant that the standard of care for a women under 35 who has had successful cycles is 1 or 2 transferred embryos.
@chingona
Apologies for the improper language use–I should know better, having supported 2 of my closest friends through their IVF journeys. Having watched others do IVF (sometimes for multiple cycles) I do wonder how Nadya could afford at least 7 cycles without a high paying job, but that in the end is her business.
I totally agree with chingona’s point about higher order multiples. I think even triplets is nearly impossible for 2 parents to handle, and any more CLEARLY requires family/friends/hired support just for the extra hands for feeding until the kids can actually hold bottles themselves! Let alone cleaning, diaper changing, holding, and entertaining that many kids at approximately the same level of development. I also agree that unless the family finances look more like Bill Gates’s than like the average US family’s, some degree of financial help is also necessary just for buying 8 sets of everything, all at once. Also, I can’t imagine that 8 babies in the NICU wouldn’t hit the annual or even lifetime health insurance benefit pretty quickly, even for “good” insurance.
As for the death threats, I am saddened, but not surprised. Nadya Suleman hits the conservative button lottery–she is of Arab descent (her parents are from Iraq), she is unmarried, she is disabled, she has a large family already, and she is currently receiving public support for at least some of her older kids. What shocks me is the number of people who want her kids to be put in foster care–not only does that betray a complete lack of understanding about how much MORE that would cost, but do people REALLY think that life as a foster kid (especially a disabled foster kid) is better than life with a mother who seems to really love her kids? So what if the apartment is crowded–none of the kids look neglected or malnourished from what I’ve seen.
JaneDoh,
The doctor treated her like a customer. So long as he got informed consent before transferring the embryos — i.e., told her that this was risky, that given her past successful pregnancies all the embryos might implant, that some of them might divide further, that a high-multi-pregnancy endangered both her and the fetuses, etc. — he was leaving the decision up to her. Good libertarian salesman, bad health care professional. Professional responsibility includes sometimes saying “No.”
Incidentally, the Swedes seem to have a much saner IVF policy: get rid of the economic incentive to transfer a dozen embryos at once to maximize the likelihood that an embryo will “take,” by covering unlimited cycles with insurance so long as only one embryo is transferred at a time, thereby hugely reducing the number of multiple-births and thus the cost, trauma and incidence of disability in the children that result.
“You don’t get this type of widespread, hyper-violent reaction from a question of economics – not even, I would argue, from people disgusted with the Wall Street bailouts.”
This quote really spoke to me. I go all sorts of ways on this issue; I think Nadya’s desire for 8 more children when she had 6 already and some of the reasons that she brings up are highly questionable, I think her doctor is a disgrace to the medical community for treating her like a customer and not a patient, and yet somehow I think even if this woman had the money to support her kids, as a non-white, unmarried, disabled member of society her children would still be more likely to be seen as burdens rather than blessings.
However, no matter which way you go on this, I have a hard time believing that death threats and even this level of media scrutiny is really necessary. As bad as it sounds, when I hear the anger people have over the thought that yet more taxpayer dollars will be going to support people who are taking advantage of the system I can’t help but think, so what? It’s not like I’m not used to my tax money being used for crap I don’t support anyway. I think it’s kind of unfortunate that I have that outlook but sadly, I’ve grown in complacent in letting the government take my money and use it for whatever it deems necessary at that point.
Still, I think if I were to get angry enough to write death threats about things that my tax payer dollars go toward, surely it would be things should offend me more as a swindled American citizen. In my mind, if people got nearly half as outraged about other issues as they did with this one woman, the changes we could make in government would be astounding. At the end of the day however, the kids didn’t ask for any of this to happen and I’d rather see taxes come out of my paychecks to help them grow and survive to hopefully become productive citizens and return the payout than have my money be used for almost anything else, if absolutely necessary.
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I feel as though the health care provider, (her doctor), should either surrender their license or pay to provide for the children. Clearly the professional… wasn’t very. Did the doctor ever wonder who was going to provide for them?
The haters have moved on from death threats to property destruction.