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.

[jrittenhouse]

The doctor's protocol on his method was to throw tons of embryos in there and hope something sticks. When we went through IVF, they were much more ethical and straightforward on THIS part of it, and stressed that they would not put more than two back in, and stress why 'selective reductions' were often used

[rennie_frog]

Huh, interesting. The several times I had eggs put back in at that same clinic, they were using 4 at a time...