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Bonnie, your continued fascination with octomom Nadya Suleman reminds me of the most recent headline-grabbing baby story: England is all atwitter with news of Alfie Patten, the 13-year-old father of newborn Maisie. Impregnating a fellow teen (the mother is 15-year-old Chantelle Steadman) in middle school isn't necessarily tabloid-ready news, but Alfie clocks in at around 4 feet tall and looks like he's about 8 years old. Alfie's notoriety might have just been another flash in the sordid tabloid pan, but according to the AP, his tween parenthood has reignited the teen pregnancy debate in the United Kingdom. Britain's teen pregnancy rate is among the highest in Europe, though it's still far lower than the United States'.
Alfie's story broke last week, and today the Daily Mail is reporting that the wee teen is demanding a paternity test on the advice of his father. In addition, two other minors have stepped up to claim paternity of Chantelle Steadman's baby girl. One could dismiss both Suleman's and Patten's stories as tabloid trash, but both tales have gained traction in the mainstream media. Richard Lawson at Gawker posits that celebrity baby mania has created a greedy gaping public maw that yearns to be filled with any and all baby news. I guess people need something to distract them from the economy until Brangelina decide to adopt a South American to round out their brood.
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Although it seems to be having a few technical problems, Nadya Suleman, ad hoc CEO of the octuplets+6 media corporation, recently set up a tasteful portal to capture a revenue stream (accepts credit cards!) during the launch of her new family business. As Dahlia mentioned last week, the newly delivered mother of eight slightly resembles Angelina Jolie. In addition to their age and some physical similarities, both women also seem very comfortable with far more notoriety than a truly rational individual would ever want. (Is it a coincidence that Jolie's 1999 breakthrough performance as a mental institution patient in Girl, Interrupted was the same year as Suleman's injury at her California mental hospital job? The worker compensation settlements provided development capital for her new venture.) Giving a whole new meaning to the notion of sweat equity, to provide manpower for the company, the fecund executive also ovulated enough viable IVF embryos to incubate 14 of them to delivery from six pregnancies.
Speaking of compensation, NBC insists it paid "not a dime" to air the first post-birth Ann Curry interview with "Octomom," nor for any of the access and personal materials used in the network's "special Dateline" featuring her other six children. Nevertheless, I'd love to read the contract between NBC's legal department and Ms. Suleman's business managers, spelling out what everyone did agree to.
Anyway, I applaud the fledgling media dynamo's entrepreneurship and resourcefulness and hope for Suleman that she gets that cable reality show. Who knows? Maybe it will even get network interest from, say, NBC. As for Suleman's 14 fatherless offspring, they will, it seems, be joining the growing ranks of working realty actors that includes ratings magnet and 3-year-old son of the current Bachelor star Jason Mesnick. While the Pitt children, though perhaps too often pressed into service as accessories, are so far still unemployed.
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Dahlia, I see the Angelina resemblance (morphed a bit with Janeane Garofolo). Both women have youth, beauty, and more notoriety than a sane person would ever dream of. But Nadya Suleman has 14 kids to support, no job, and no Brad Pitt. Possibly, the publicity machine will take her somewhere ("Tuesday a special Dateline: How are her other six children doing?"), but despite her chances for a cable reality show, I have a bad feeling her steely optimism will not be enough to carry her to a movie-star happy ending.
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I can’t tear myself away from the story of Nadya Suleman, who recently added octuplets to her family of six small kids, without a job, home, or spouse. She lives with her mother in a three-bedroom home, although it looks like her rent free days are soon to be over. Yet in a series of interviews with NBC’s Ann Curry, the 33-year-old Nadya sounds like she’s got it all figured out: She’s just going to finish her degree and get a job and move her 14 children into a new house. Good thing the economy is booming.
Suleman told Curry—and Nancy Gibbs at Time seems to agree—that we are judging her differently from other parents of multiples (who get showered with Pampers and phone calls from the president) merely because she isn’t married. Are they right? Noreen, you posted about free-floating squeamishness about big families, but are we even nastier when there is no dad? Suleman is not on welfare (she is collecting workers compensation) and she really does appear to adore her kids. So is she really all that different from another famous baby-collector, Angelina Jolie, to whom she bears—by the way—a freakish resemblance?
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While we're parsing our octuplet obsession, it's worth reading Judith Warner's recent column on child-related panics in general—whether they're about teenagers and sex, or overscheduled kids, or overmedicated kids, or commodified kids. She makes the good point that such panics rarely clarify children's real situations, much less inform good decisions. Instead they tend to blur subtleties and obscure hard choices, while letting adults project their own anxieties and wallow in concern over lost innocence. (Overscheduling, for example, isn't exactly the universal childhood problem you'd think from affluent parents' alarm. Overextended adults, though, are a problem, not least because they're too frazzled to focus on the urgent problems of poor kids with too little to occupy them.)
As for the octuplets, let's hope their arrival prompts a hard, cold examination of assisted reproductive technology rather than endless appalled voyeurism. This isn't the first fertility freak show to unfold during hard times: Remember the story of the poor Dionne quintuplets 75 years ago? Then the government—the girls were born in Canada—did step in, in the name of protecting the babies from exploitation and danger. But instead of helping, the effect was to perpetuate the circus: The girls were sequestered in Quintland, which became a national tourist attraction up there with (or even beyond) Niagara Falls. That's not part of a stimulus package we need, but here is a market that surely needs regulating.
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Noreen, I feel your pain. As the oldest of 11 children, I am no stranger to the raised eyebrows that come with the large-family territory, and I am constantly taken aback by the questions people feel they can ask me (like whether I think my parents are "done" and the ever-popular question of whether I know all my siblings' names). I have even been asked, "Wait, you have 10 siblings and you're not crazy?"
And, yes, people always, always want to judge my parents. (My father's standard response is, "Which one would you give back?") All of which has taught me, if nothing else, to be wary of judging anyone's family decisions, though I'm not sure I would choose to feature those family decisions on television. I don't think there is such a thing as the objectively perfect mother, and I don't think good parenting has anything to do with how many children you have or how many children you can have at once. It has to do with making the best choices for yourself and your children, and it's dangerous to judge someone else's parenting choices.
When the time comes, I want to be able to decide for myself what will make me the best mother to my children, irrespective of anyone else's parenting decisions.
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Jessica, I think you're right that the fascination with the Duggars and their cohort is more than simple freak show, can't-look-away compulsion. People are always oddly obsessed with/judgmental of big families, even if they're not extreme cases. I'm one of six kids. Often when I mention that fact, people seem to think that means they can freely inquire about my parents' finances, their views on birth control, and whether any of us are deeply screwed up or were ignored. They even want to know stuff like the number of gallons of milk we drank a week (eight, for those of you keeping track at home, all lined up in our restaurant-style refrigerator) and conjure images of KrazyKop station wagons and hellish family vacations, or ask if my life was like Cheaper By The Dozen. We're a far cry from the Duggars or this crazy octuplet story, but I think even slightly outsize familes provide sort of a larger-than-life yardstick against which people get to judge their own life choices. If someone else manages to have a greater-than-normal-number of kids who don't end up deeply screwed up, I think in a weird way that makes some people feel like maybe they're not giving everything they could as parents (even though that's nutty logic). Or watching the Duggars makes people feel a lot better about the life they're giving their kids. It's sort of a bombastic example that throws your own family into relief, and since we're all endlessly fascinated with ourselves and our own families, bam, ratings gold.
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Jessica, you're right—TLC must be salivating at the thought of signing a reality TV show deal with the mother of the octuplets. (Incidentally, the word octuplets appears in neither my Word spell checker nor in the dictionary Slate uses, though the dictionary does include octuple as an adjective, noun, and verb.) I'd imagine that the mother herself isn't Quiverfull: Couples who follow the principles of the Quiverfull movement vow to accept as many children as God gives them, whether that's 20 kids or four or none, and they reject both contraception and fertility treatments as attempts to interfere with the lord's plan. Perhaps she's a Quiverfull groupie?
I wish I could put a finger on why I and so many others find this story fascinating. Maybe it's because this is one of those places where the right and the left ends of the social spectrum are in agreement. Conservative bloggers have called the mother irresponsible and speculated about what assistant programs she and her children could be enrolled in or eligible for. Liberal bloggers worry about everything from whether the kids will get enough attention to what the family's carbon footprint will be. I don't think I've seen anyone celebrating the "miracle" of this birth—the responses I've encountered have expressed only horror.
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Well, Jessica, maybe people are riveted to these shows the way they are riveted to every reality show: At least I'm not as crazy as they are! Or, in the case of the mean nanny shows, at least my house isn't as bad as that!
And Bonnie, forget what the woman herself was thinking: What was the doctor thinking? It should be medical malpractice to implant eight embryos, given the extreme probability of premature births leading to crippling disabilities—especially if the woman says in advance that she would not be inclined to reduce the number if they all implanted.
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What was she thinking, Bonnie? Maybe she was thinking that she'd get a reality TV show. While there's always been some interest in massively fertile women, it seems that in the past few years, more and more of these moms-of-multiples have been getting media attention. First there's Kate Gosselin, who has a set of sextuplets and a set of twins, as well as her own TLC show, Jon & Kate Plus 8. Then there's her network-mate Michelle Duggar (pictured at left), who has given birth to 18 children and even allowed TLC to film her giving birth to number 18.
I've seen a few episodes of both Jon & Kate and the Duggars' show, and they're outrageously banal. Entire episodes are constructed around a single task: Jon makes dinner! Jinger Duggar gets her driver's license! (Side note: All 18 of the Dugger children have names that begin with J). And it makes me wonder why these families are getting more than their 15 minutes of fame. Is it merely the freak show aspect of having so many babies? Or is it something else, something that reinforces the idea that fertility is a woman's greatest virtue? Considering the fact that the Duggars are part of an evangelical movement called Quiverfull, which eschews birth control and promotes the idea that a woman's primary function is to be a mother, I'd say it's the latter.
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At first, the media and medical establishment tsk-tsking over irresponsible fertility treatments seemed a bit, er, premature in the coverage of the California woman who delivered eight babies totaling over 16 pounds at Kaiser Permanente Bellflower, this week. None of the relatives had spoken to the press (despite the many TV bookers undoubtedly camped out in their Whittier cul-de-sac since the birth of the six boys and two girls was announced Monday) and the delivery team, who have not been as camera shy, would not comment on whether the mother had had prenatal medical intervention. Yesterday, an "acquaintance" told reporters the still unidentified new mother, who lives with her mother and father while her husband is stationed in Iraq, has six more children, including a set of twins, at home. The new arrivals, who were delivered from her distended uterus in about five minutes, brought the number of family members who will occupy a three-bedroom home to at least 17. It seemed unlikely to me that the overburdened woman would turn to assisted reproductive technologies to enlarge her family, especially given how expensive and only fractionally insurance-covered fertility treatments are. I thought perhaps the 32-year-old woman was just preternaturally fertile. Her generation has been environmentally exposed to so much chemical estrogen and other fertility-inducing substances, I reasoned, and litter-sized multiple births could be a harbinger of things to come. But we learned today from the Los Angeles Times, who coaxed the grandmother, Angela Suleman, to the phone that fertilized embryos had indeed been implanted in her daughter 30 weeks ago and to her surprise all of them "took." I am normally not one to question another woman's reproductive choices, but I can't help wondering, what was she thinking?