Consequences:

[jrittenhouse]

More stuff coming out on the octuplet stuff.

The dirty secret that many fertility clinics don’t want people to notice is that they sell hope by the very expensive bucketful, and their stats / success rate is actually worse than advertised if you can get past the caveats and BS.  But if the people don’t have hope, they won’t come into the clinic,

Comments

[ice_queen82]

Me, I concern myself most towards the 14 kids.
Me too. I just don't see how 14 children that close in age can have a very good life...

[jrittenhouse]

What hits me is that I can't imagine what sort of individual time she would have as a single parent for them. My family watches the Duggar stuff, and man, that family is organized as an army. Has to be. But the older kids take a BIG role in handling the younger kids. If the kids are all tiny, that makes that impossible.

[ice_queen82]

Exactly. I don't see how any of them can have the attention they deserve and I couldn't imagine living like that.

I know my Grandma had a happy upbringing as one of ten children on a farm in County Durham, but they were spread out over 17 years and I know her oldest brother paid for some things for her when she was in grammar school (she was second or third youngest). Things were simpler in those days anyway, as she's 98 this month...

[qnofhrt]

My mom was the same was as one of 11 (I think she's #7). She was sent to live with her oldest sister when she was 6 and her sister was having her first baby.

My pediatric pharmacist collegue says it is a MIRACLE that these kids are in as good a shape as they are. He says it's not uncommon for even twins or triplets to spend weeks on a ventilator, rather than being on and off in a matter of days and several never having been on one to begin with.

OTOH, the more I hear about this case, the madder I get. Unlike Jim, I don't think there will be criminal prosecution regarding the doc who did the IVFs. It's a very unregulated industry because there are a limited number of good scientific studies on what works and what doesn't. My friend who underwent IVF a few years ago said she was told absolutely no more embryos than 3 at a time, because of the possibility of doubling in vivo.

But...the doctors certainly should have questioned the wisdom of doing IVF on a woman who already had 6 babies.

[zurcherart]

Wow, this is just unravelling, eh?

While a little taxpayer outrage in this case might be good, shouldn't information about her disability case be confidential. I don't think it's right of the LA Times/media to flag all that.

It's also funny/interesting to me, how in current American hyperpsychoanalyzed, media-aware, reality TV culture people just know how to say all the right things in an interview while being totally wrong in many ways.

The danger with the taxpayer outrage as I see it is this could turn into a crusade against single mothers and poor families on welfare or social assistance at the very time that many families may really and legitimately need more help or need help for the first time. Is she the new Cadillac driving welfare queen for folks on the right and even the middle? Because she has made herself into a very good (if inaccurate) poster mother for welfare reform if nothing else.

[jrittenhouse]

A LJ friend is upset about people's focus on the welfare mother stuff while ignoring the real bandits who ravished the economy and the government. I replied that I have written tons and tons on the bandits, and want them all strung up long before this nutty woman and the twits who furthered this along. This is getting more play - partly because of the octuplet end of things (being the dad of a twin, I know the reaction twins get, and the WOW factor on multiples goes up exponentially with the higher number...) and partly because of the nutty background stuff on the woman, and partly because of the fact that she's on the public dole of one sort or another, in a state that is bankrupt and giving its workers IOUs instead of checks.

Welfare in the USA is not something that pays for anything resembling a lavish lifestyle; it's subsistence at best.

[zurcherart]

Yeah we are incomplete agreement.

I read your response as maybe slightly defensive, though I honestly can't tell if it was meant to be (or really if anyone else would read it that way). So I'm adding that I didn't think you personally were letting bandits off the hook while targeting welfare moms (of multiple birth babies). I was elaborating on my own thoughts that came from reading your interesting post.

[jrittenhouse]

I guess my response to you was a tiny bit defensive, but not to you, more towards the anger of the other LJ poster. I understood her anger as such, and just needed to clarify my position.

[mbcrui]

If the California DCFS doesn’t yank a number of them out of that house and into the system before it’s all over, I’ll be astonished -

You know, we have a sect up here who don't believe in birth control and where multiple births run in the families. It is not unusual for a woman to have 10 -14 kids 8 and under. Yes, having 8 babies is mind boggling, but it's not impossible if you have a support system... and it sounds as if her family and church are helping.

I had a kid in my class who had 18 brothers and sisters, and, when his aunt and uncle were killed in a car crash, his parents took their 10 children. In a 3 bedroom farm house. No big.

This situation just has more publicity because of the 8 at once. When she goes off the national radar, I expect the kids will be fine.

[jrittenhouse]

I know about Quiverfull and similar 'we'll outbreeed the heathens' stuff elsewhere.

I haven't heard about her church helping. I'm all for people helping out other people, but I'm not so charitable about helping out people who are doing really reckless things and expect that someone's going to fish them out because they always have - which is one of the things I hated about Dubya.

[mbcrui]

It was on one of the interviews with Anne Currie, don't know if I heard it this morning or last night.

Check out Finnish Apostolic.

[jrittenhouse]

I found church references, but not as to which one.

[amysuemom]

While I tend to agree that this woman likely has some major issues, I remind everyone that so far not one of her children has been flagged as being neglected or abused! The fact that she is poor or single or even has functional MH issues does mean we get to preemptively take away her kids!

The hypocrisy surrounding this astounds me! Yeah, the doc involved is self-serving and may indeed be seen to have violated various tax codes and maybe some medical ones as well, but it's still a private choice and suddenly saying that reproductive privacy extends only to people you think deserve it is wrong.

All that said, should their be more oversight into the huge business that is reproductive medicine? Absolutely. The way to do that though is not to string this woman up by her toes.

imho

[amysuemom]

Um that should read "doesn't mean we get to preemtpiviely take her children away"

[jrittenhouse]

I think that the state of California is going to be under such colossal pressure on this to gig someone that DCFS will be all over her home situation. She will have home inspections up the wazoo to see if she is handling things; if she was mnessing up and flying under the radar before, she won't be able to do so now. This isn't my preference, this is what I think will happen.

Same thing with the doc. If this was Angelina Jolie and she was well-off but looney (think Michael Jackson's kids or Mia Farrow's 15 kids - some bio, most adopted) the most that would happen is that they'd shake their heads and roll their eyes. But the question is - where did the money for the IVFs come from? Did the Doc eat it? Did he charge the state of California and lie about it? Did he fake her costs into costs for other people? Hard to say. (When we went through IVF stuff, it cost about $10000 a try, and insurance paid for it.)

[jerusha]

Not to mention that, of the six existing kids, one is diagnosed autistic and two others have some level of developmental delay/disability such that they're receiving state funds. I don't know what standards of care the state requires, and what might get increased supervision and/or removal of a child from custody, but I cannot believe that those children in particular will get the attention they need with one parent in the house. (I haven't seen any references to her church helping out; the quotes that I've seen from the octuplets' mother and grandmother (mom's mom) indicate that Mom thinks that Grandma will happily step in and help her (read: take over); Grandma isn't as sure

[drzarron]

I've listened to the interview with this woman... She's fucking crazy.. period. Whoever her "doctor" is should be stripped of his license and driven out of town. His action are downright criminal.

[jrittenhouse]

I think she's looney / baby-happy to a ridiculous degree. People get strong desires to have kids; the amount of hell we went through to get one - heck, I could go on for a while about how much of a tremendous drag that was, and how you don't do this on a whim, and even when it went to adoption, the amount of angst that goes out on mailing lists as people waited for referrals to start coming back from China - man, people were really freaking out. It's all of their hopes and dreams in a big fat ball after a LOT of disappointments

[drzarron]

Especially when the AMA's guideline for a women in her mid-30's is to implant 2 embryos per procedure.

[jrittenhouse]

Again, this guy was obviously ignoring any usual guidelines. Throw lots of embryos in and see if it sticks.