Who’s to say a woman can’t have 14 kids by whatever means possible?
It didn’t take long for the story to turn sour. No one has a good word to say for these little bundles of joy any more, it seems — or for their mother, to be precise. As more and more details emerged, seemingly every interest group had reason to pour scorn on Nadya Suleman.
The God squad didn’t like it that the babies were conceived using in vitro fertilization — something the clinic was reluctant to disclose at first. To make matters worse, there was no obvious father, let alone a wedding ring to be seen. In fact, the sperm donor was, apparently, a neighbour of Nadya’s.
As if that weren’t enough for some, Ms Suleman already had six children, all of them products of the test tube and none of them is biologically related to the man she was married to until recently.
So now she has 14. The climate change crowd jumped in at that point, complaining they were all as good as personally responsible for global warming and the destruction of the Amazonian rainforest.
The greenies found common cause, for once, with the fiscal conservatives. Who was going to pay for the little monsters, they asked? The mother is unemployed without any means of support, they wailed: the state is going to be picking up the tab. How on earth were Nadya, 14 children and her parents all going to have room to live in a two-bedroomed bungalow? Surely, the taxpayer was going to end up footing the bill for a small hotel to house them in?
The medical profession wasn’t happy either: it was a miracle they hadn’t been born with awful heart and brain injuries, they intoned.
To add insult to injury, some conspiracy theorists picked up on the mother’s name and chimed in that it was all an Islamist plot to outbreed the white Christian population of the US of A. Was she being sponsored by some shady outfit? Was it a stunt to get herself a TV deal?
More charitable souls just wondered how she was going to cope: would the poor children’s upbringing be compromised? The cry that something must be done went up from busybodies around the world. This cannot be allowed to happen again in a supposedly civilised society. But who was to blame, if “blame” is the right word? Nadya Suleman for being a supposedly irresponsible mother — or even possibly mentally ill? Or the fertility doctors who treated her who might or might not be American — she isn’t saying?
At that point, the God squad found themselves caught in a quandary because the usual advice in a case of a very high level of multiple births is for a partial abortion, terminating some of the foetuses in order to improve the chances for the rest. Nadya “refused to have them killed,” Grandma Suleman is reported as saying. And if there’s one thing worse for pro-lifers than bringing babies into this world artificially, it is taking them out of this world artificially.
All I can say is, thank goodness Nadya isn’t a lesbian: imagine the fuss then.
Personally, all this abuse that Nadya Suleman is being subjected to makes me nervous. For one thing, IVF has brought immense joy to many couples who, through no fault of their own, have been unable to have children the old-fashioned way.
If interfering with nature is a terrible thing, let’s close down our hospitals right this instant. Presumably, God gave humans the ingenuity to make IVF possible, though, in just the same way as he gave us the capacity to perform blood transfusions and develop pharmaceuticals.
As for the environmental argument, can we take it that all babies are little carbon-producers and, therefore, sinners against Mother Earth? And is anyone really saying that poor people don’t have the same right to reproduce as rich people?
Are we going to send teams into council estates armed with vasectomy devices to snip every virile-looking male? Besides, it isn’t that long ago that 14 children was — if not common — scarcely unheard of, either. The anti-Muslim argument isn’t worthy of a reply.
Nadya Suleman might not be wise about her own health, about the life chances of her children or about society — but she is entitled to make her own choices, just as everyone is entitled not to have children.
And as for clinic that made it all happen, they can give advice but who are they to say “this many kids and no more”? Where do we draw the line if the taxpayer isn’t paying for the treatment? Are limits to be put on those men and women blessed with amazing natural fertility?
Once the embryos had been implanted, does anyone apart from the mother have the right to decide whether to go through with the pregnancy? Many women decide to have quite a few embryos implanted and thereby increase their chances of success because the cost of each round of treatment is so incredibly high. Any government interference in the highly personal decision to have children would amount to an intolerable erosion of personal freedom: look at China. The fact is that all sorts of people have children — or don’t have children — for all sorts of reasons, not all of them exactly noble or wise. The State is well advised to stay out of it as far as possible.
Which perhaps explains why the Government here has been so slow to regulate the assisted reproductive technology industry.
AS LONG ago as 2000 the then Minister of Health, Micheál Martin, commissioned a report by a committee of experts into it, led by Prof Dervilla Donnelly. Last week, a Supreme Court judge slammed the Government for sitting on the report for more than three years in spite of an initial welcome for its findings from Mary Harney.
The rights and wrongs of one particular case are currently matters for the Supreme Court to decide upon, save to say that what constitutes “the unborn” — an issue which has bedeviled Irish life for decades — is at issue.
The general point, however, is whether these matters are best handled by means of guidelines or by legislation? Some will be horrified automatically by anything the medical profession does that might appear to be “unregulated”.
But isn’t there an equally strong argument that, history suggests, legislation — or even constitutional provision — has the effect of entrenching social mores in this area that are quite magnificently out of date? At the same time, Justice Geoghegan is entitled to ask what coherence there is to Government policy. Why commission expert advice, then welcome the subsequent report and say the current situation is “not satisfactory” only to do nothing so far as anyone can see?
One imagines the European Commission will have something to say if things are left as they are indefinitely. When the Government does get its act together, though, it would be wise to adopt a light touch to regulation — even if that isn’t very fashionable in these hard-pressed times.
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