The Pandora's Box That Begat Octomom
by Fr. Roger Landry - February 20, 2009
Everyone agrees that Nadya Suleman did something wrong. Where the debate begins is over what she did wrong, why it was wrong, and what our society needs to do to prevent its recurrence.
The facts of the Suleman saga are well-known. On January 26, she gave birth to octuplets at Kaiser Permanente Hospital in Bell Flower, California. The initial fascination over a multiple birth that could have come through the use of hyperovulatory fertility treatments turned first into incredulity and then into outrage when it was revealed that the mother of these eight babies was unmarried, unemployed, on food stamps, living with her disapproving 69 year-old mother (who last year had filed for bankruptcy) and already the mother of six, all of whom were similarly conceived with a sperm donor through in vitro fertilization. The nation's collective indignation only grew when it was reported that she had obtained both a publicist and an agent and was seeking a seven-figure payment to appear on television. That was enough even to make moral relativists rediscover moral absolutes.
The questions came fast and furious from all corners. The initial ones were practical and personal. How could a doctor give fertility treatments at all to a mother of six? How could he irresponsibly implant six embryos within her (two of whom ended twinning)? How could a mom with half dozen kids including three who are developmentally challenged ask to be implanted with a half-dozen more? Why didn't she "selectively reduce" — in other words, kill, through the relatively-common euphemistically-concealed practice of prenatal triage — some of her children to give the others a better chance at survival? Who will take care of the kids? Who will pay for the roughly $3.2 million just for neonatal care for the children? How much more will California taxpayers need to absorb afterward in raising the kids? Is there anything to stop others, or frankly even her, from doing this again?
The subsequent questions were more philosophical and probing. Should the fertility industry at last be regulated? If so, what criteria should be used to determine if a person should be able to have access to fertility treatments? If adoptive parents need to go through extensive interview processes to assess fitness before they're allowed to adopt, what should the process be for a mother to be implanted with embryos? What rights and responsibilities does a doctor have when a person asks to be implanted with multiple embryos? Does a person have a right to a child? Does a person have a right to 14 or more children? Does a woman have a right to however many children she wants, even when for psychological, financial and marital reasons there are serious questions about her maternal aptitude? What rights, if any, do the children have? What corresponding duties does society have toward them? Is it better for them to remain frozen or to be implanted? If there's a multiple pregnancy, should all children be allowed the chance to live or should some be sacrificed for the sake of others? If some should be killed to give others a better chance at birth and life-after-birth, what criteria should be used to determine which of the brothers and sisters should live and which should die?
There are the types of inevitable questions that arise as a result of the immoral practice of in-vitro fertilization, which is based on the premise that a child is a piece of property that a parent can have manufactured in a laboratory and then either implanted, frozen or discarded at will. It is a paradoxical extension of the logic that justifies abortion, which proclaims that a woman has a right to do whatever she wants with her body and any other bodies that happen to "belong" to her before birth.
Conservative columnist Jeff Jacoby picked up on this pro-choice connection in a February 11 column in the Boston Globe when he wrote, "What are we to make of all this criticism? Is it once again acceptable in politically-correct society to disparage other people's unconventional or unwise reproductive decisions? … It was only a couple of weeks ago, after all, that the 36th anniversary of Roe v. Wade was being commemorated with the customary paeans to the right of American women to make their own decisions about pregnancy and parenthood. Haven't we been told for years that society has no authority to second-guess what a woman does with her own body? Haven't the champions of 'choice' and 'reproductive freedom' repeatedly instructed us that what happens in a woman's womb is between her and her doctor? How is it that so many feel free to pass judgment on the choices made by Suleman and her doctors, let alone to call for new regulations banning such choices in the future? …
"In the name of autonomy, privacy, and adult self-esteem, our public policies regarding families and reproduction have grown increasingly unmoored from good sense. From the campaign for homosexual marriage to the routine insemination of single women to the legality of abortion on demand, notions that would once have been thought outlandish have steadily been normalized. Would that further industrial-scale pregnancies like Suleman's could be headed off with a new law or stepped-up regulation. But can law and regulation fill the void left when longstanding taboos and morals are cast aside? When society decides that families and child-rearing can be improvised at will, who gets to say what's 'freakish?'"
Some might classify those thoughts as merely the musings of the Globe's sole conservative columnist, but they were in fact building on the questions raised by his liberal colleague Ellen Goodman in a Globe article five days prior. Goodman suggested that the answers to the questions raised by Suleman's actions can only be given by revisiting some of those "longstanding taboos and morals" to which Jacoby alludes. Goodman writes:
"Everything that we don't really want to talk about in terms of pregnancy and child rearing - marital status, money, individual choice, responsibility, and technology - … converged in the shouting and blogging over Nadya Suleman's womb mates. Does anyone have a right to tell anyone else how many kids to have? Can only people who can afford them bear children? Do you need a husband to have a baby? These are questions that make us feel queasy when we are talking about old-fashioned families. But they take on a new flavor in the unregulated wild west of fertility technology. … Fertility doctors don't say no - nor should they - to single or gay patients or those who already have children. Doctors do not do home visits or psychological evaluations or socio-economic profiles on patients who want children. At most, doctors do what bioethicist Arthur Caplan calls 'a wallet biopsy' to see if they can pay the bill. We are far more rigorous about accepting people for adoption or foster care than for fertility treatments. But shouldn't there be limits?"
Yes, there should be. The Church, in fact, teaches that there should be more than limits, since we're dealing with an evil in kind and not just in number or degree. Once society concedes the principle that doctors have the authority to assemble children in test tubes and that those children are just pieces of property whose life and death are left totally at the discretion of their mothers, it's only a matter of time until we have people making decisions like Nadya Sulemans and her doctor Michael Kamrava. The tearing down of the "longstanding taboos and morals," all of which sought to affirm the right children have to be born of the loving union of a married father and mother, has just sped up the process.
Honesty demands that we should not stand in judgment of the indulgent, irresponsible, unethical, and "freakish" actions of Nadya Suleman and Michael Kamrava without at the same time criticizing and reforming the indulgence, irresponsibility, immorality and lunacy of our attitudes that enabled them.
Father Roger J. Landry is pastor of St. Anthony of Padua in New Bedford, MA and Executive Editor of The Anchor, the weekly newspaper of the Diocese of Fall River.
