It's often a funny thing when right and left agree, as did many vocal commentators across the ideological spectrum this week in condemning Nadya Suleman, the mother of the California octuplets conceived by in vitro fertilization and delivered last week by a team of 46 doctors and nurses. Such a large number of multiple births is so rare, many media reports pointed out, that only one previous example of octuplets exists in U.S history. It's also so rare that Microsoft Word's spellcheck doesn't recognize the word "octuplet," as several online commenters reported. This response in itself, speaking to the volumes of Internet opinionating the octuplets have inspired, gives some indication of how completely the controversy has transformed from a story based in solid facts - of which there are still very few so far - into the latest projection screen for fertility and childbirth controversies.
Big Families We Love, and Love to Hate
Nadya Suleman's interview with Ann Curry on the Today Show
Suleman's newborns were delivered, as it were, into a pop cultural moment of preoccupation with large families. Reality TV shows about families with many children abound on TV's TLC channel, most notably with the chronicles of the 18-child Duggar family. That the Duggars are grounded in and motivated by the pro-patriarchy Quiverfull movement, with its emphasis on female submission and male headship, is breezily dispensed with in favor of dwelling on the sentimental and zany experiences of life in a 20-person family. "Jon and Kate Plus Eight," another reality TV show about a large family - this one the result of sextuplets born to a mother who, like Suleman, chose not to selectively reduce the number of embryos that "took" during an IVF treatment - is less burdened by the extremist ideology that undergirds the Duggars' convictions, but still presents a traditional picture of large family life, with married heterosexual parents and a stay-at-home mother. Though it's now impossible to separate the public reaction to Suleman's delivery from the swirl of facts and speculation about her motivations and mental health, it seems clear enough that much of the ire directed at her is due to her unorthodox family situation and her singleness most of all. While many observers are concerned with her apparent inability to support such a large family, the fact that she is unmarried has alone been cause enough for others to declare her family a situation of de facto child abuse.
Finding the Facts
Probably most readers know what there is to know about the story so far - what there is to know limited by the fact that Suleman hasn't talked publicly about her pregnancy. What is left are slivers of information from interviews with family members and neighbors. Nadya Suleman, a single mother and unemployed student with a degree in child and adolescent development, was an only child, and always wanted a large family. According to some, she aimed for 12 children in total, or maybe, after the six she already had through IVF, just one more girl. Her parents apparently recently declared bankruptcy, and moved with Suleman into a 3-bedroom house they'd bought for her, where they helped her care for her already-large family. When controversy erupted, Suleman quickly retained a spokeswoman, which, with her reported target of a $2 million appearance on Oprah, sealed her public persona as American villain rather than American sweetheart. Sadder facts of the story include the interviews with Suleman's mother, Angela Suleman, who has hinted at possible mental illness in her daughter by venting her frustration with her daughter's "obsession" with children. Another poignant detail is the report that Suleman's father, reportedly a Palestinian-born linguist, may have to return to a contract position in Iraq to raise money for the care of his daughter's 14-child family.
When "Miracle News" Sours
After a brief moment of "miracle news" coverage when the successful delivery was first announced, criticism of Suleman and her unnamed doctors began to mount from across the ideological spectrum. The hospital where she delivered reported receiving numerous calls demanding that their medical license be revoked and even several from people wishing the Suleman babies wouldn't survive. More common were the concerns, on the left, that the children would be neglected or that they constituted an environmentally hazardous selfishness, and on the right, the charge that Suleman was the end result of a culture that condones single parenthood and glorifies individual choice above all other considerations.
Individual choice didn't seem to be a particular concern throughout the debate though, which has been marked by highly moralistic overtones in discussing whether or not Suleman's pregnancy should have been "allowed" to take place. On liberal websites, a surprising hostility to Suleman’s right to have made such reproductive decisions has been common, taking issue with whether Suleman was entitled to choose to have so many children in her circumstances, seeming to embrace a sort of anti-choice rhetoric. (Though it’s worth noting that OB-GYN Amy Tuteur, writing on Salon, makes a convincing argument for limiting “right to choose” analogies, as endless comparisons to abortion rights only serve to distort discussions of medical ethics.) And on some conservative websites, there has been an equally surprising insistence that Suleman should have been forced to abort some of the embryos. A number of fertility doctors contacted to give expert opinions seemed to rush to distance themselves from what one bioethicist, M. Sara Rosenthal, called an "outrageous" breach of medical protocol. While the implantation of eight embryos, if it did occur - and this seems up for debate as well, as Angela Suleman told the AP that "far fewer" than eight embryos were implanted in her daughter, and that they then apparently multiplied - would certainly be beyond the pale by almost all medical standards, some of the pronouncements of fertility ethics had an unsettling whiff of paternalism. One article discussed how responsible doctors may have to "simply [say] no," to women seeking multiple implantations in order to "be a strong and responsible advocate for moms and babies." In an interview with CNN, Rosenthal raised the neonatalist theory that women may not have the emotional capacity to make proper decisions when informed about the risks of premature births due to the distress such news may cause them.
What's Desirable vs. What's Allowed
This sort of language and reasoning, at least taking place as a debate in the non-expert arena of the media, seems too familiar for comfort, echoing the sort of anti-abortion rhetoric Justice Anthony Kennedy relied upon in the 2007 Carhart case: that abortion is not a crime women commit, but one they need to be protected from by those who know better. The danger of slipping into that territory, of empowering doctors to determine women's reproductive best interests, seems enough justification to allow for cases that offend public sensibility. As Sean Tipton, spokesman for the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, explained, "A number of commentators are saying a woman with six kids should not be allowed medical treatment to have additional ones, and I think, at a common sense level, that makes good sense. However, to make that work, that means someone is going to start deciding for other people how, when and why they can have children. That's a very big step and one that we might not be prepared to take."
But in contrast to that reasonable estimation of the difference between what's desirable and what's allowed, is the overlap of criticism between camps that would normally be at ideological ends. Both conservative and liberal commenters loudly wondered who, in this moment of financial meltdown, was going to pay for all of this. Right-wing California shock jock Bill Handel declared the births "freakish," and announced that people were "ready to boycott any corporations that help the octuplets or their mother." Likewise, commenters discussing the story on liberal site Huffington Post suggested that if Oprah did host Suleman on her show, viewers should boycott Oprah as well. (Neither side should likely worry, as the AP reported on the snubbing response of Pampers and Gerbers officials, who donated little or nothing to the Suleman family. Television station TLC has said that, while it has contacted the Sulemans about television opportunities, it's holding off any production decisions until they determine how "TV-friendly" the family proves.) A comment thread title on Yelp summed up the sentiment of many: "Octuplets born in Bellflower, she better not be on Welfare!!"
Indeed, a number of feminist writers remarked on how closely the outrage over Suleman mirrored old "welfare queen" tropes, where large families weren't seen as miraculous or a Cheaper By the Dozen adventure - as more traditionalistic large families are often portrayed on TV and in popular media - but as burdens to the state, brought on by an irresponsible mother. Lynn Paltrow, Executive Director of the National Advocates for Pregnant Women, told Salon's Broadsheet that perceived race of mothers was often a key component of how stories of large families were treated in the media. "When the pregnant woman is not brown or black and the drugs/technologies are provided by big pharma, the discussion focuses on questions of ethics. But if the issue is childbearing by low-income women of color, and the drug is homegrown/illegal then the debate is a question of punishment through the criminal justice or civil child welfare system."
This angle was sadly confirmed by some blog comments speculating whether the name "Suleman" had a "very ethnic ring to it - Middle Eastern in fact." Conservative blogger Phyllis Chesler took these insinuations a few steps farther, swiftly dispatching with the makeup of America's most prominent pronatalist activists - complementarian conservative Chrsitians - to hang the mantle of over-the-top procreation on fundamentalist Mormon polygamists and Muslims (whom she refers to as "outlawed, break-away Mormon and law-abiding Muslim men," in case her meaning isn't clear). After noting that "Osama bin Laden's father had 57 children," Chesler wonders whether Suleman's ethnicity is determining her family size, writing, "Once this gets out-will she become a poster child/mother for....free baby formula and diapers? Or for Jihad?"
More commonly, the indictments were more subtle, as characterized by Townhall conservative columnist Mona Charen, whose reaction was to blame the octuplets on as-yet-unmarried California Representative Linda Sanchez, who announced her pregnancy last November.
Different Judgments for Different Families
Jill Stanek, a veteran anti-choice activist who opposes IVF, condemned Suleman as well, albeit somewhat reluctantly. "The question I'm hearing often asked, ‘Can one have too many children?'" she wrote, "is wrong. No, one cannot. But God didn't intend for human mothers to give birth to litters, particularly with no husbands in sight. It's unnatural on all levels."
Some of Stanek's ardently anti-abortion readers were harsher, with one declaring that "[Suleman's] mentality is abortion mentality: ‘I will decide who lives, who dies, when I have children.' I bet she isn't even infertile!" the writer continued, "Just hates men!" This level of vitriol sparked Stanek to defend Suleman, and to come to the surprising defense that "sexism at play here. Were Suleman married, no one would be questioning her motive for becoming pregnant with multiples."
That’s not quite true. The large families promoted most ardently by the pronatalist “Quiverfull” wing of the anti-abortion movement strongly emphasize the importance of not planning one’s family – either by limiting it or artificially enlarging it – viewing such self-determination, even in the interests of growing a family, as the root of the reproductive choices they condemn. Though certainly many would be more accepting of a large family that had IVF children than they are of those who choose contraception or abortion, most hold, as one of Stanek's commenters writes, that "If one believes as I do that God determines fertility, then one believes that in a proper husband-wife relationship God will supply a large family's needs."
Among the movement of purposefully very large families in the U.S., this is the predominant conviction, almost universally accompanied by an extreme traditionalism in marriage roles that holds women's prolific fertility up not as one option to choose but as the only righteous path for true believers. Suleman's family size may approximate that of the Duggars and other families at the forefront of a theological movement that stresses traditional gender roles above all other concerns, but that is likely where the resemblance ends. In terms of reproductive matters of national concern, one woman's idiosyncratic and likely tragic choices seem to pale beside a movement that insists on similarly large and labor-intensive broods of children for women and raises daughters to see this as the only blueprint for their lives. It says something about where we are as a country that the former isolated case attracts more concern than the existence of the latter as a growing movement.
