nadya suleman

all week long i've been watching as the octoplet mom went from miracle worker to maligned.  one one hand, i'm disgusted with the woman.  how dare she bring fourteen children into the world when she's single, unemployed, and living with her mother?  i mean, having a child - even a single child into a stable household - is ultimately an act of narcissism.  we all want to have a little piece of ourselves to hold onto.  otherwise birth rates would plummet and adoption rates would skyrocket.  why did i decide to get pregnant instead of adopt?  because i'm a little narcissistic, too.  but this woman took it to the fourteenth power, and then some.

and on the other hand, who am i to criticize this woman's decision?  i firmly believe that marriage and family are two topics that the government should be strictly uninvolved in.  that extends to the right of two loving people to marry each other regardless of race or sex.  and it also extends to the right of a single woman to birth fourteen children.  indeed, one of the foremost tenets of my political beliefs is that the government should be amoral, and should not legislate religion.

and i also firmly believe in social programs.  i think that they are wonderful, and wonderfully important, and wonderfully beneficial for people who have a true need.  and this woman is going to need a lot of them in order to raise these children.

and as much as i believe in social programs, i believe equally in personal responsibility, and the duty of each person to try as hard as possible to avoid needing social programs.  and nadya suleman has failed miserably in that respect.  

but most of all, my heart breaks for these fourteen children.  i read in the news that she holds each of her eight premature babies for forty-five minutes a day.  forty-five minutes.  when aislinn was a newborn, i held her nonstop, spending hours on end just watching her breathe.  she's almost six months old and i STILL do that.  it's increasingly clear that nadya suleman's children's physical needs will be met by the state of california, but who is going to meet their emotional needs?

i think that for the sake of the earth and the precarious position it's in, we have a responsibility to be prudent in our decisions to have large families.  but that's a personal choice, which ultimately shouldn't be stepped on.  and at the same time, how did the medical community allow their standards to become so lax that a single mother on state aid became the mother of fourteen artificially conceived children?  we can allow chronically and terminally ill patients to wither away due to the prohibitive cost of heath care, and in the same breath we can allow a woman to use her federal disability payments to add eight more children to her existing brood of six who are already on state aid and half of whom are disabled?  where is the justice in that?

it's a situation that sets forth a lot of concepts that are difficult--if not impossible--to reconcile.