I’ve been following this whole octuplet controversy with mixed feelings. A part of me very much groks the anger being directed at Nadya Suleman. No single person can give 14 children the care and attention they all need; hell, I’m not sure a couple could manage it. If “it takes a village” to raise one child, this woman’s going to need five boroughs, and Yonkers too.
But that didn’t account for the vehemence I’ve been seeing in the media and elsewhere about Suleman. Sure, some of it is clearly rooted in the revelation that the state will be paying for these kids’ care, and the creepy possibility that she may have blown some of that state-provided money on plastic surgery to look like Angelina Jolie. But there’s far worse examples out there of unhealthily large families, narcissistic parents, and exploitation of public resources. Why’s this one got people so riled?
Then I read this analysis of the situation, which I think does a good job of explaining the outrage.
The great storm of public fury that has been kicked up by these octuplets is more than an annoyance at the water cooler. It is a vivid demonstration of the price that our country pays every day for the comforting moral clarity of the “right to life,” a fragile construct that has always been partly about not letting pregnant women “escape responsibility” for their actions. If a mother’s life goes to hell because she can’t afford to raise a child, well, she should have thought of that when she let herself get knocked up. The child becomes a sort of righteous punishment, not a person — and, in similar fashion, those “outraged” by Suleman’s story clearly hope that she (and, inevitably, her children) will have a rough time of it. It is the worship of motherhood, and the hatred of mothers.
This analysis feels intuitively on-track to me. But I think it’s missing two additional layers of meaning.
First, I think this is not just the worship of motherhood, but worship of ideal motherhood — ideal only if it’s within the strictures of traditional marriage and patriarchial religion, and therefore controlled one way or another by men. Uncontrolled (or female-controlled, which is the same thing in some of these people’s eyes) motherhood is never desirable. Most media outlets are reporting that the father of Suleman’s children has been caught by surprise by this, and is “a bit overwhelmed”. I think the anti-abortion movement will hold up Suleman not as a heroine, but as a cautionary tale: men, control your womenfolk, or they’ll have babies as they see fit, and see what happens then?
Second, it didn’t escape my notice, when I saw clips of her on TV, that Suleman is a bit on the brown side. And I could be wrong about this, but her name seems like a derivation of a common Arabic name, Suleiman — common enough that I, a garden-variety American with about as much knowledge of Arabic culture as I have of nuclear physics, recognized it as such. I could be totally spinning in the wind here; she might be Swedish for all I know. But I can’t help wondering how much of the rage I’m seeing — not merely outrage, but murderous incandescent fury — is because the Welfare Queen specter has been raised in Americans’ minds, perhaps conflated in some weird-ass way with The Arab Threat and maybe even The Brown Conspiracy To Outbreed White People? (Suleman’s fertility doctor appears to be Indian, see. We’re all in on it!)
You remember the Welfare Queen, don’t you? Ronald Reagan created her to get elected 20 years ago, as columnist Paul Krugman notes:
As Thomas and Mary Edsall put it in their classic 1991 book, “Chain Reaction: The impact of race, rights and taxes on American politics,” “Reagan paralleled Nixon’s success in constructing a politics and a strategy of governing that attacked policies targeted toward blacks and other minorities without reference to race — a conservative politics that had the effect of polarizing the electorate along racial lines.”
Thus, Reagan repeatedly told the bogus story of the Cadillac-driving welfare queen — a gross exaggeration of a minor case of welfare fraud. He never mentioned the woman’s race, but he didn’t have to.
So even though the vast majority of welfare recipients in the US are rural whites forced into poverty by the destruction of America’s industrial economy, the association of welfare with greedy, lazy, urban brown women has become indelible in the American subconscious. And even though the pendulum seems to have swung back since Reagan’s time, and we’re now in a vaguely liberal phase, my suspicion is that this linkage still exists, hair-triggered in our national zeitgeist, ready to fire at the first sign of dusky skin and fertile ovaries. That Suleman may be of Arab ethnicity — the zeitgeist’s latest boogeywoman — just compounds the issue. Now instead of black wombs destroying America for selfish gain, we’ve got Arab wombs destroying America in order to imitate and replace white women. It’s like Invasion of the Bodysnatchers without the giant beanpods.
I wouldn’t be surprised to see Suleman’s case trotted out again in about 18 months, when the Republicans start campaigning for the midterm elections. After all, if Reagan’s Cadillac-driving mystery woman could be so effective, how much more effective the collagen-injecting octuplet mom, who at least has a name?
I don’t think people would have any less rage for her family if she had an unemployed husband on the public dole. Maybe less rage for her directly. Obviously, there are conservatives who obsess over the nuclear family who detest all other forms of family units, but they’re hardly a large enough group to account for this kind of large-scale backpedaling on the part of the media. Remember that we’re seeing the angry reactions outside of the bible belt. You don’t go far bashing single moms in New York or Seattle or California or Ontario.
Part of the problem is that the woman falls into that little pit-space between the kind of insanity where people have pity for you, and the kind of clarity that keeps you from doing stuff like this. The kind of destructive neurosis that creates addicted gamblers, and compulsive liars, paranoid abusers, and the like – people who are sane enough that we can relate to them and consider them responsible for their actions, but crazy enough that they are driven to do things that people find repulsive (for good reason). People we blame for failing to restrain themselves.
A lot of Americans believe that people should not have children if the only expected way to fund those children is going to be the public dollar. This is a pretty center-right idea, and not way out in the fundy right field like hating all single moms. Obviously, very few right-wingers would want to legislate to that effect and actually restrict the legal freedom to do so, but if you asked the average Republican, “Independant”, Libertarian, or “swing voter” the question: “Should people have kids when they will be entirely dependant on tax dollars to support them”, then the answer would probably be “no”. Then take this “no” to the ridiculous extreme of a woman who already has 6 kids she can’t support herself, and the new birth is another 8.
She’s obviously making these decisions because of mental health issues, and nobody stopped her. That’s where a good amount of rage comes from. Doctors, government, etc. can’t stop a woman from doing this the old fashioned Duggaresque way, but they are in the position to prevent this woman from being implanted with 8 children that she is not capable of caring for.
But yes, a lot of this is rage at the welfare state. Go look at a family that is having to cut back on all their luxuries to feed their 2.4 kids, and tell them that the tax money that would help them maintain their standard of life through the recession is instead going to a woman who had 8 kids when she already had 6, and that she has no hope of supporting, or giving a decent quality of life, and by the very act of having 8 of them at once has doomed many of them to health problems.
There are plenty of sources for righteous fury beyond bigoted anger at her non-traditional family.
Personally, I fall on the “this woman is crazy, had lots of kids already, and is not in the position to raise them effectively – why the hell did the medical system provide that service to her”?
Second, it didn’t escape my notice, when I saw clips of her on TV, that Suleman is a bit on the brown side. And I could be wrong about this, but her name seems like a derivation of a common Arabic name, Suleiman — common enough that I, a garden-variety American with about as much knowledge of Arabic culture as I have of nuclear physics, recognized it as such.
In earlier news reports, they mentioned that her family (at least her father’s side) was of Iraqi descent.
Here in the UK with whom I’ve spoken, feelings tend to be 3-fold:
feelings of pity towards the poor kids having to grow up in that over populated household.
feelings of suprise for the stupidity of the doctors who thought there was nothing wrong in this.
feelings of disgust for another family on the dole, claiming money for doing nothing but breeding.
Nothing about race, nothing about colour, nothing about ‘patriarcal’ (sp?) expectations. Men & women, young and old in our office here in the UK were kinda horrified by it all.
I’m glad you posted about this. Listening to the media coverage about this woman has me so enraged, and I can’t help but think that we’re up in arms against this woman because she’s a woman, and also a non-white woman. I can’t help but also think of how many men there are that have a dozen or so children, some with different women, and how everyone chooses to ignore that. I feel like it’s because men can distance themselves from their children. When they have children, their first identity is not “father,” like a woman’s identity becomes “mother.” I feel like this has something to do with the fact that women carry the children; for nine months she is close to the child; she’s not a woman, she’s a pregnant woman, then she’s a mother. Why does our society look down on single-motherhood? At every family reunion there are whispers about my cousin, who has two sons from two different fathers, and it’s like she should be ashamed, or people view these children as punishments; serves her right for not keeping her legs crossed!
And now we’re all fired up about Suleman. She’s single, and now has fourteen children. I don’t even know this woman–in fact, a lot of people have never met this woman, and yet they’re pissed about the reproductive choices a stranger has made. Is it the choice I would have made? Hell no, but then again I don’t really like children. Am I going to condemn someone who loves children for having lots of children? No. It’s her choice, and it hardly affects me. And now, with our economy so bad, everyone’s so adamant about making this one woman a scapegoat. Maybe I wouldn’t be so pissed if we could be mad at a man for this same reason, but I can’t ever see it happening…
FilthyGrandeur,
People definitely get angry at men (usually stereotyped as men of color) who have kids with multiple women, especially when those men can’t or won’t financially support the women and kids. One of my friends has a lot of contempt for his cousin’s (white) ex-husband, who is on his fourth wife and has a total of 10 kids so far, because the cousin essentially has to support the four kids she had with him on her own; he is lousy about paying alimony and child support. P.J. O’Rourke, who often is seen as a “socially liberal” Republican (simply because he had a lot of sex and did a lot of drugs when he was younger), remarked in a post-election “where the GOP went wrong” piece, “Under constant political pressure, which went almost unresisted by conservatives, a lot of lousy mortgages that would never be repaid were handed out to Jim Jerk and his drinking buddies and all the ex-wives and single mothers with whom Jim and his pals have littered the nation.”
PG,
I get what you’re saying, but I feel like there’s more animosity towards single mothers. The “dead-beat” dads thing is different though because they’re not the ones trying to raise the kids. They’re irresponsible, but still absent. Suleman is the primary care-giver to these children.
The men who have kids with multiple women are socially despised, but I still think that that women who had these kids are somehow viewed as worse because they should have known what they were getting into, as somehow the woman is more responsible because she’s actually carrying the child. There are stereotypes against men, and men of color, but women are viewed as the gatekeepers. Men can’t control their dicks so it is apparently the woman’s responsibility to say no.
FG,
Suleman is the primary care-giver to these children.
Well, yeah, the “father” is some guy she knows who donated the sperm to make the kids. That’s not a father even in a legal sense; sperm donors have no obligations to the offspring that result. It doesn’t sound like she consulted with him about how many kids she would have using that sperm. There’s no dick-control issue here.
@FilthyGrandeur
I think it’s a result of the fact that, with the exception of condoms, birth control is in the hands of women. Combine that with the stereotype that women desire to have children more than men (I’m too lazy to google to see if there are studies that prove it true or not).
Put together, the woman is blamed for creating the children. The man is blamed for failing to support them. Which is why, imho, if she had an unemployed husband he would be sharing some of the disgust. If she had a working husband and thus was viewed as “trying to get off the public dole”, then the anger would be far less.
filthygrandeur,
Even if she wasn’t single, legally and ethically, there’s not really a damn thing any putative husband could have done to stop her. What could he do? Force an abortion? (bad) Threaten to divorce her? (also, I predict, see as bad.) Threaten to refuse to pay child support? (bad)
With power comes responsibility and all that. So long as women are able to maintain (which they should) ultimate power over their pregnancies, which gives them the final choice about how many (if any) children to have, then they will always be perceived as having greater responsibility for the existence of their children.
It’s true that he’s castigating Jim for serial householding. But it’s still a little, “He covered you in pearls, and now he shall cover you in shame.” Jim Jerk watches as lenders foreclose on the house his ex-girlfriend and estranged children live in: sucks to be Jim.
Maybe I’m quibbling here, but it seems like the passivity here isn’t so much a recognition of paternal responsibility as a conflation of “being a dick who runs out on your parenting responsibilities” and “failing to properly trap the proper man.”
It’s true that deadbeat dads also come in for blame. But policies that ostensibly punish equally–or promote self-reliance equally–tend in practice to hurt the primary caregiver. A deadbeat dad is a man who abandons his family. Welfare queens are sinners because they insist that the state help care for the children they haven’t abandoned. So who would suffer more from a public-services policy that insists that families have to stand on their own two feet?
I don’t think this holds true. Abortion was illegal in this country until a generation or so ago, and reliable birth control is not much older. Both have been condemned as perversity, tied to a warped role for women and mothers. Women are not supposed to control their reproductive processes beyond sex.
Traditionally, women weren’t vested with reproductive control as a right–at any stage of the process, from whether to when to whom to how many. Women have not generally had either legal or practical control over how many babies they wanted to have. But they have been blamed for failing to have children in secure circumstances: in wedlock, in durable wedlock, in a prosperous household, in prosperous times.
There was massive stigma attached to unwed mothers and left wives–and women who refused to have children at all–even when women could not prosecute rape or hold property in marriage. Women have even been blamed for failing to keep their husbands from sleeping with and maybe impregnating other women. What level of control balances that responsibility?
In fact, it seems like the movement to hold fathers responsible for their wild oats has gained consensus strength along with the idea that women should have control over childbearing. I think this is a better version of parity: to the extent they could control the situation, both people have contributed to the existence of a child, and both have to contribute to its welfare.
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In fact, it seems like the movement to hold fathers responsible for their wild oats has gained consensus strength along with the idea that women should have control over childbearing.
I’m not sure how precisely accurate this is. Child support requirements long predate women’s reliable birth control or safe medical abortion. There’s a famous contracts case, Fiege v. Boehm (1956), where the putative father agreed to pay child support to the unmarried woman who claimed he had impregnated her, to avoid having her prosecute him for bastardy. (It’s famous because even in those pre-DNA days, they figured out from blood typing tests that he couldn’t be the father, so he breached the contract and she sued.)
The prosecution for bastardy has existed in the U.S. since at least the 1860s, and is mentioned in a short story from pre-Pill days about a black man who had been courting a black woman, the black woman gets sexually assaulted and impregnated by white men, and the white men declare that the black man must have impregnated her and force the two into marriage. (The story is by a famous black writer, but I read it in high school and can’t remember if it’s Ellison or someone else.)
Should the “sperm-donor” should be let off the hook with respect to supporting these 14 children? This isn’t the same as where somebody makes an anonymous “contribution” at a sperm bank and as no knowledge of or control over whose eggs are fertilized by his “swimmers.” This guy was a friend of Suleman and was presumably aware of her situation. Even if there was an agreement between them that he wouldn’t be on the hook for child support, an argument could be made that such an agreement is against public policy.
Paul R,
Not all sperm is transferred anonymously through banks (and in such cases, it’s not sperm donation, it’s sperm *selling*). Genuine *donation* usually is between people who know each other, and it’s common enough that if you start messing with the contracts that guarantee the donor won’t be the legal father, you’re going to rouse a lot of opposition from people who wanted to know who the biological father of their children would be. Once that contractual guarantee is called into question, no sane person would donate.
Thanks. Admittedly, I was mostly paying attention to Western stigma laid on unwed mothers, which I think has unarguably lessened over the past few generations. But speaking of literary examples, I could have remembered Hester Prynne’s babydaddy.
But since neither the children nor the State of California are parties to that contract, how is it binding on them? If he had impregnated her the traditional way, the courts wouldn’t hesitate to order him to pay child support notwithstanding any agreements between them, especially if there’s no one else available to play the role of father (or other mother) and she’s receiving government assistance. Why should the use of an alternative method of fertilization and impregnation make a difference?
I think the anger at her is misplaced. The anger needs to be at the doctor who transferred 6 embryos, which is a clear breach of the standard of care. The Amer Society for Reproductive Medicine, the governing body for the repro endocrinologists, very clearly states that the guidelines are typically a transfer of 2 embryos, 3 in some select cases. This doctor should have his license revoked for transferring 6. It simply isn’t good medicine. I don’t care if she had 6 kids already or had no kids already, I don’t care if she’s on welfare or if she is a trust fund heiress, the anger should be at a doctor who transferred 6 embryos outside of the standard of care. Too many people are stupid-romantic about multiple births. They are DANGEROUS. The body wasn’t meant to carry more than one.
Paul, it’s socially beneficial for mothers to have the choice of known sperm donors rather than anonymous sperm donors. Both for mental well-being, and for access to important information about their family’s medical history, many grown children of pregnancies achieved through artificial insemination have said that they think the “open” model, in which the biological father is known, is preferable to the anonymous model.
I don’t think that cutting off the open model of sperm donation, just so we can collect child support in a case like this one (even assuming that the father has the economic ability to pay child support, which seems unlikely), isn’t a good trade-off. Especially since it wouldn’t prevent cases like this from occurring in the future; it would just guarantee that they’d be done with sperm from anonymous donors, which wouldn’t benefit anybody.
I think few people would have the means to pay child support for 8 children. Garnishing 90% of his net pay maybe? And that would probably not be enough unless his net pay is a couple thousands a week.
But yeah, as others have said, if a sperm donor is liable to get to pay child support, he won’t donate sperm. Unless he likes to finance children he won’t ever see (which I doubt is common).
i think my point has been misinterpreted. i’m certainly not saying she should have a man, or need one, to keep her in check, so to speak. i was just pointing out how i’m sick of hearing about how this one woman has lots of kids she may not be able to support, when there are handfuls of men out there in the same situation, yet they’re not receiving ridiculous amounts of media attention, nor are they made into a scapegoat.
Actually, I think the most that can be garnished from wages for child support is 50% of net pay. The court can set child support higher than that, but the excess over 50% would have to be obtained by other means. Also, an inability to pay the full amount needed to support the children isn’t generally considered a reason not to make the non-custodial parent pay _some_ child support.
I still don’t see the logic for letting the known biological father off the hook when the fertilization is by AI, when that same known biological father can be made responsible to pay child support when the fertilization is by coitus.
And is there no point at which the State of California can say to this man that if he keeps on contributing his sperm, he’s going to have to bear some responsibility for the result? Let’s say in a couple of years she’s still unable to support the kids she already has, and she decides she wants six more kids so the total will be an even 20. Should the state still have no right to step in and tell him that if he contributes his sperm now, he’ll have to help support the children that result from his contribution? Is there no point at which the state should be able to say “enough already!”?
Agree with Amp.
The point is this: we can make a man who isn’t biologically the father, but has acted as one, legally the father and thus put him on the hook for support.
Logically, the reverse can be true – a man who is biologically the father, but doesn’t act as one in even the most trivial form (he wasn’t even present at the time of conception, which is generally true for most biological fathers), and the child was conceived with that understanding, can also be not-the-father.
Also, I think the reason that this woman is getting reviled (compared to others who may be worse) is partially simply because she’s in the news. 8 babies at once is newsworthy, controversy or not. So she’s in the news by default. There is no shortage of worse parents out there, but none of them have a factor that is making their parentage newsworthy.
So if we talk about “what about deadbeat men who have 14 kids they don’t support”, the question then becomes “what has one of those deadbeats done that was newsworthy lately?”
Maybe I’m looking at this too simplisticly, but I really think that a great deal of the outrage is because this was done on purpose in a very expensive medical procedure. She doesn’t just have 14 kids, she went out and essentially bought 8 of them with money that she didn’t have. That’s a really big, key difference to me in this story, which makes this unique from any other news story about single-motherhood or public assistance for children. Given that we’re currently in an economic crisis because people have been buying things with money they don’t have (like houses), I think there is some outrage over that practice being applied to children.
Now, why the hatred? Again, we’re in an economic crisis. There are quite a few people out there who would classify themselves as hard-working people who are doing everything “right” and yet they still stay up most nights sincerely worrying about how they’re going to provide for their children. How we define “right” is up for lots of excellent debate and discussion, but “right” at the moment is generally that you work hard to pay the bills and provide for your family, whether you’re single or married.
I married a guy from another country and we went through the process to get him a green card here in the US. During the period of time when he wasn’t legally allowed to work in this country, I was working two jobs to try to pay the bills and all the immigration costs. My second job involved cashiering at a grocery store. And it inspired a little anger whenever I was ringing up people who, from their language/appearance, seemed to be from countries other than the US and were using food stamps to buy their groceries. This anger amplified when they were buying items that my super-tight budget would not allow me to purchase because they were expensive convenience items. Normally, my more rational self would have figured that there was a perfectly good reason for any given person to be on food stamps. But when I was tired and sore and sick of living on a strict budget while my educated husband wasn’t able to work or get any public assistance – it just made me rather angry in that way people tend to get angry when things just don’t seem very fair.
I think that a lot of the current anger comes from the fact that Suleman didn’t just end up with 14 kids, she somehow bought 8 “really expensive” kids at one time and now we are all paying for those kids while many people are seriously stressed out over how they are going to pay for our own kids. And now, the perception is probably that she’s going to get rich over this through publicity.
That just strikes a lot of people as incredibly unfair. This whole story becomes a glaring contrast to many people’s current realities and therefore becomes a place to direct the anger and frustration they are feeling as our economy crashes and that reality becomes far less than ideal.
Paul, the distinction here is not “conception via AI or IVF” versus “conception the old fashioned way” — that would, indeed, be an absurd basis on which to decide whether a biological father should have to pay child support. The distinction when it comes to known sperm donors (and I don’t know the details of this case, but I can only assume they followed this essentially universal protocol), is a man who impregnated a girlfriend, wife, or lover, intentionally or not, versus a man who entered an explicit legal agreement in which a woman (or couple) could use his sperm to conceive and in which he specifically relinquishes all parental rights and responsibilities.
We can certainly hold a man a who intentionally conceived a child responsible for that child, and, for the well-being of children, we also hold men responsible for children they didn’t intend to conceive. But what you’re proposing is making it illegal for men to be sperm donors (that is, to donate sperm under an explicit agreement not to have any parental rights or responsibilities). This case is a freak example; the large majority of people using sperm donors are capable parents with the resources to raise their children. Think lesbian couples and straight couples in which the man is infertile. Your suggestion might improve the circumstances of extremely rare cases like these, but, as Amp pointed out at #19, it would also make it impossible for the large majority of folks using known sperm donors to do so at all.
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Susanne,
This doctor should have his license revoked for transferring 6. It simply isn’t good medicine.
It’s not within the recommendations, but since those recommendations aren’t legally binding (i.e. you can go against them without breaking the law) and the patient isn’t filing a complaint with the state nor suing for medical malpractice, I don’t think he’s likely to lose his license. The one realistic thing about the show “House” is that if you end up saving the patient, you probably can go against a lot of guidelines without losing your medical license. Reproductive medicine, like cosmetic surgery, has a strong retail aspect to it: you’re “making better” someone who isn’t actually sick. In the absence of binding regulations on what you’re allowed to do, a happy patient is your guarantee against penalties: the customer is always right.
Sarah,
I think you nailed it.
Along with Sarah, I also agree that the public is outraged due to the medical process Nadya underwent in order to become pregnant and her lack of proper medical guidance. I am a single mother as well, I do not appreciate the public beating Nadya up so badly. For all you Americans whom state she is a welfare abuser and she deserves to suffer. I say to you, shame on you all!!! That is the type of ignorance that will keep this country from ever being “free” of hate and full of hate for children and women. In America if you are not married with 2.5 kids and white, then something is wrong with you. And I say to you with my being multi-ethnic, my ancestors built this country and we never got a thank you, this country is suppose to be the land of the free. Back off of single mothers period. No one in their right mind would want several children with no father.
The action of men whom leave their children cannot be answered by the women they also leave behind. It is not easy with my going to school, working, and being a mom and dad. But at the end of the day, I know that no one cares, and that is what I teach my children. The world is cold and look out for you and your siblings, there are people who hate kids and women.
And in conclusion, America, until we find a way to have unity and love for women and children instead of hate. We will all fail, you selfish, ignorant, goat loving, beer drinking perverts. Its okay to have sex in America as long as you don’t have a baby? For all who are against Nadya and any other single mother, grow up!
@Silence is foo. We don’t want your pity. Pity is another word for prejudice to people with disabilities of all kinds. And really what is your degree or license or education to diagnose someone you have never met? Even psychiatrists are not ethcially allowed to do that. I don’t know what motivated this woman and neither do you but I do feel silenced by your comments. And to whomever said even two parents can’t raise that many children, well you know that’s just not true. Large families of that size were not that uncommon in my youth/childhood and I did not see any difference between how the children turned out from these large families than from smaller families. A new mother is getting death threats and not one commenter expresses outrage at that?