Or perhaps this show: 17 Kids and Counting.
They just gave birth to their 18th.
[quote=“sjcma”]Or perhaps this show: 17 Kids and Counting.
They just gave birth to their 18th.[/quote]
The father’s first name is Jim Bob. That just about says it all.
When I heard the name I envisioned some redneck living off in a one room shack in the woods with his wife and 18 children, walking ten miles a day to the nearest post office to collect his welfare check. As it turns out, Jim Bob Duggar is a successful real estate agent who mostly lives on his commercial real estate investments. He served in the Arkansas State Legislature for several years. He has accepted private charity, but never one dime of government welfare. Here’s a picture of the Duggar family. They look pretty normal.
Quite a different situation to that described in the OP.
When I heard the name I envisioned some redneck living off in a one room shack in the woods with his wife and 18 children, walking ten miles a day to the nearest post office to collect his welfare check. As it turns out, Jim Bob Duggar is a successful real estate agent who mostly lives on his commercial real estate investments. He served in the Arkansas State Legislature for several years. He has accepted private charity, but never one dime of government welfare. Here’s a picture of the Duggar family. They look pretty normal.
Quite a different situation to that described in the OP.[/quote]
Hmmm… I have one of those Demotivational posters on rotation as my desktop image, showing this family with the words “Vagina - It’s not a clown car”
imagepoop.com/image/1707/Vag … n-Car.html 
for those of you who don’t care for the word vagina displayed proudly across their office monitors.
We got six billion peeps on planet earth. We dont need to add 17 kids per couple really.
When I heard the name I envisioned some redneck living off in a one room shack in the woods with his wife and 18 children, walking ten miles a day to the nearest post office to collect his welfare check. As it turns out, Jim Bob Duggar is a successful real estate agent who mostly lives on his commercial real estate investments. He served in the Arkansas State Legislature for several years. He has accepted private charity, but never one dime of government welfare. Here’s a picture of the Duggar family. They look pretty normal.
Quite a different situation to that described in the OP.[/quote]
Hmmm… I have one of those Demotivational posters on rotation as my desktop image, showing this family with the words “Vagina - It’s not a clown car”
imagepoop.com/image/1707/Vag … n-Car.html for those of you who don’t care for the word vagina displayed proudly across their office monitors.[/quote]
Oh, I couldn’t agree with you more.
What worries me is, at a time when most developed countries have lower and lower birth rates, reflecting higher education, in the US we have these groups advocating people like these, who believe “miscarriage was caused by use of contraception, so we will not use it anymore, for miscarriage is punishment from Above because we used contraceptives”.
Just yesterday I was reading this interview with an indigenous activist back home. She was complaining precisely about this. She mentioned her people used contraceptives before, and how her grandfather was an only son. Yet, now, they are imposed this mentality to have “as many children as God commands”.
I’ve always found beyond my comprehension the fact that girls back home sleep around but refuse to take the pill, saying “they are not that kind of girls”.
As a matter of fact, I extremely disagree with the fertility goddess 6 plus 8 woman, because she only talks about what she wants. Why this emphasis on a big family? How big does it have to be for HER to be happy? How about having a happy family instead of a big one?
I have 4 cats and a dog and I am streched out, trying to make them feel I pay attention to each individually. I can’t imagine how you can manage with so many kids -we were 5, and many thinsg slipped through the cracks -some regretfully, most thankfully, others dangerously.
A bunch of random thoughts.
It may not be ‘ideal’, but it’s not always unhappy or bad. Yet another personal anecdote: when my aunt’s four were in their teens, they started to foster younger children. Many were asylum seekers with no parents in the UK (their parents pay to somehow get them into Britain, often from east Africa, and they arrive, deeply traumatised, in the clothes they stand in and no English), troubled British kids. The house usually had eight-ten kids, more at the weekend because there’d be cousins (me) too. At her funeral, 40-50 teens, twenty andd thirty-somethings sat in the front rows and cried.
I know it’s a different situation from ‘vanity parenting’, but some people are simply ‘mothers’. Why not respect that, even if they aren’t self-supporting? The current way of thinking is that a child is a personal possession that you should be able to pay for, a sort of meat credit card agreement. An expression of love for our partner, for ourselves, not something that is part of the wider world.
I’m not saying that what you guys think is ‘wrong’. But that we place a lot of emphasis on ‘best’ and have this almost scientific approach to child-rearing. We want to raise kids in our own image, not to create and nurture an individual. Those five children you never had may have gone on to do something great. And a bad childhood isn’t as crippling as we think. It’s simply a waste of time. We learn through bad examples as well as good.
Of course, one or two children, with two deeply loving parents, preferably with one of them staying home to supplement the kid’s education, and a host of other conditions may be ‘best’ in that that kid will be smarter, stronger, more morally conventional (as common sense tells us), but life isn’t like that for 98% of the world. And if your parents are a pair of whackos who are so vain and purposeless they need to breed football team with subs, than at least you have siblings with you.
I have 30+ cousins. I’m not actually sure how many siblings I have. I love this huge extended tribe. I couldn’t imagine how staid and unsupported my life would have been without my gang of catholic breeders, gymslip mothers and mid-life crisis in Asia rellies. And we ain’t perfect, but we give more 'n we take. Life’s rich pageant, and what not.
Anyway, I don’t have a position here other than I’m a pro-mother kind of person. Given that a woman with a baby can’t force a man to support their children and can’t work and pay for childcare, I think that if we need to stretch the ‘personal responibility’ thing slightly and accept that women have children they can’t personally pay for and that this enriches and diminishes us because people are fallible.
Phew. I’d better write what I’m being paid to write now.
If she’s not self-supporting, then she is in effect forcing the rest of us to pay for her kids. There’s nothing about that worthy of respect.
So am I, when the mother in question has at least some sense of responsibility. I have no problems with the Duggars or any like them who have 18+ children, as long as they’re able to take care of them.
This woman intentionally got pregnant with multiple embryos using expense medical technology. She wasn’t seduced and ditched by some random guy who left the state and is dodging child support payments. She did this to herself. I fail to see how that enriches us in the slightest.
[quote=“Mother Theresa”]You may have read of the lady in California who was expecting to give birth to 7 kids last week, but was surprised to have 8. Well, I finally read about who she is and am less than impressed.
[quote]How in the world does a woman with six children get a fertility doctor to help her have more — eight more?
[/quote]
google.com/hostednews/ap/art … QD961UN600[/quote]
Usually people in western nations who have more than six kids are hard-core religious types who say “god wants/blesses us to do this”.
The female in question (she is undeserving of the word woman) is having kids the way some crazy old people collect cats.
[quote=“Sleepyhead”]
The female in question (she is undeserving of the word woman) is having kids the way some crazy old people collect cats.[/quote]
What a bizarre thing to say. For failing to use modern medical technology and limiting childbirth in a way that has only been possible for around 50 years out of the whole history of humankind, she doesn’t deserve to be called ‘woman’?
Anne Boleyn will be turning in her grave.
You think that’s harsh. Listen to this:
[quote]Joan Juliet Buck: … All this just seems to be proof that the wrongheaded greed of the past years has extended to the most private recesses of a woman’s body.
Liz Smith: …Forgive me if I seem brutal, but the “mother” sounds really nuts to me, and I am disgusted by a culture that will reward her with millions of dollars in advertising connections and TV appearances.
Joan Ganz Cooney: To me, having 14 or 18 children, either the old-fashioned way or via in-vitro fertilization, is a form of child abuse. It is manifestly unfair to the children who will never get enough parental attention and love. …Those children will have cost the health-care system millions of dollars before this is over and, although we aren’t being told about it, you can bet that heroic measures are being taken to save all those children’s lives. If they all do survive, some are almost sure to have lifelong medical problems.
[color=#FF0000]Judith Martin: Should women or couples be allowed to profit from having so many children? I see something just a wee bit wrong with a “Cheaper by the Dozen” law that would do for big families what the “Son of Sam” law does for murderers.[/color]
[/quote]
lifestyle.msn.com/your-life/bigg … >1=32001
Ouch!
Had to look up the Son of Sam law: (from wikipedia)
Double ouch.
But they do have a point. I still question the mother’s mental health. I mean, think of the logistics involved:
[quote]Saltz later opined to Lauer that Suleman’s statement reveals emotional issues. “I think she’s in a bit of denial here and quite defensive, because in fact she does talk about the fact that this has been her life’s mission: to have babies, have babies, have babies. There’s an obsession to this, and I think it’s quite disturbing,” the psychiatrist said.
…
Lesley Stahl: I just can’t imagine how this unmarried, single mom of 14 is going to cope. How is she going to feed eight tiny babies? Think assembly line. How is she going to get them up in the morning? Dress them? And I don’t mean BUY the clothes; I mean actually put them on. Can you visualize what her grocery cart is going to look like? Mounds of diapers (what’s taller than a mound?), formula (don’t even think about breast feeding … please), booties, bibs. Can she do it with just one changing table? What if the kids have colic?
I did a story on “60 Minutes” in 1991 on Camille Geraldi, an extraordinarily heroic woman who adopted 15 children with Down syndrome. She was gifted - not only in her compassion and her capacity to love, but in her organizational abilities. She did indeed get the baby-raising down to a science! I can still see her lineup of high chairs! And the little shoes in military formation in one of the closets. We went with her to the grocery store as she piled up carts (plural), and sat in while the young kids from the neighborhood came over in the morning to help Camille feed and dress the babies.
I’m pretty sure this woman in California has not thought through all the difficulties - big and small, financial and quotidian. As I said, I just can’t imagine how this woman is going to handle it
[/quote]
I think hyping up her story and glossing over the glorification of her “motherhood” is a clear blow to human rights, childrens rights and the overall condition of women everywhere.
[quote=“Icon”]
I think hyping up her story and glossing over the glorification of her “motherhood” is a clear blow to human rights, childrens rights and the overall condition of women everywhere.[/quote]
I don’t know how much people are hyping the story as much as they are utterly disgusted by it, especially residents of CA and those who are part of the Kaiser Permanente medical network. This lady has serious, serious financial problems now. Those 8 children she just had have landed her a
2 million US medical bill. She practically has to sell her story just to pay off the bill. What kind of precedent will that set? Have as many kids as you can so you can go on Oprah?
More than that, she hasn’t worked since 1999 when she was injured in a riot at a state mental facility. She collected 165,000 in disability payments from 2002 to 2008. If she was so disabled from the injury that she can’t work anymore (debilitating back injury), how the hell is she going to take care of all those children? She’s divorced now, maybe her two grandparents who live with her in that little 3 bedroom bungalow can help but that’s still 3 people for 14 children. 14 children under the age of 7. 8 of them are infants who are premature.
I think the state will have no other option than to support this lady, in spite of her, so that her children can have food and clothing. The thing that pisses me off is that the rest of us CA taxpayers don’t have any other recourse. We have to financially support her choice to have so many children. Why should she get to make that choice when it isn’t her money involved?
[quote]Lesley Stahl: I just can’t imagine how this unmarried, single mom of 14 is going to cope. How is she going to feed eight tiny babies? Think assembly line. How is she going to get them up in the morning? Dress them? And I don’t mean BUY the clothes; I mean actually put them on. . .
I’m pretty sure this woman in California has not thought through all the difficulties - big and small, financial and quotidian. As I said, I just can’t imagine how this woman is going to handle it[/quote]
Good point. When I was a kid I had a friend who was one of 10 children: Mathew, Ernie, Peter, Rachel, Steve, John, Eric, Dave, Chris and Kathy. The kids’ parents (Catholic) were still together. I didn’t know the mom, but the dad was a very strong man. He built their house himself, was a high-school biology teacher, and passed on strong genes to his kids, several of whom were extraordinary athletes, in track, gymnastics and wrestling. I visited their house several times and was impressed with how well behaved they all were and how well organized it all was, with charts posted in various locations, assigning particular chores to each child, in rotation, so they could all help carry the burden, because the parents alone couldn’t possibly cook, clean, shop, bathe, dress and care for that many kids by themselves.
Here in Taiwan, my wife has a (Taiwanese) friend who is one of 10 children and, here’s the crazy thing, when they reached number 11 the parents decided that was one more than they could handle, so they gave number 11 up for adoption to another family on the other side of town (true story), so sometimes a family member will go into 7/11 or wherever and run into the kid that they gave up (who knows the whole story). In my mind, that’s pretty stupid and cruel.
Anyway, based on the family I knew (who used outstanding efforts and capabilities to make it all work) and my wife’s friend’s family (who couldn’t quite handle it) with just 10 or 11 kids, I’m fairly certain that this single mom who claims she’s in constant pain and admits to having received almost $200K in disability payments and whose own mom describes her as slighly nuts, will find it near impossible to raise 14 kids (most of them babies) and certainly won’t be able to do so without public assistance and substantial dependence on charitable gifts from others.
Does this sound like someone capable (physically, mentally, emotionally) of raising 14 kids alone (or with her near bankrupt parents)?
[quote]In her television interview, Nadya Suleman said that she wanted lots of children because she had grown up an only child in a dysfunctional family. . .
Given the enormous cost and general lack of health care coverage for IVF . . . questions have arisen about how Suleman, who previously worked as a psychiatric technician at Metropolitan State Hospital in Norwalk, Calif., earning just $625 a week, could afford such a procedure. At the time of her IVF treatments, it does not appear that Suleman was working, due to an injury sustained on the job.
Records obtained from the California Department of Industrial Relations show that Suleman received $167,908 in disability payments for a back injury suffered during a riot at the hospital where she worked on Sept. 18, 1999. . .
Psychiatric evaluations of Suleman portray a well-mannered, but very depressed and anxious woman who reported severe lower back pain, which limited her ability to pick up her 15-lb. baby without first sitting down. She also had difficulty sleeping. One doctor wrote: “Since the birth of her baby, she has become very fearful that he will be kidnapped, injured, etc. She is anxious both for herself and for him, particularly in public places to the extent that ‘somebody, my husband or my mother, has to take me almost everywhere.’” [/quote]
time.com/time/nation/article … 62,00.html
[quote=“Mother Theresa”]Anyway, based on the family I knew (who used outstanding efforts and capabilities to make it all work) and my wife’s friend’s family (who couldn’t quite handle it) with just 10 or 11 kids, I’m fairly certain that this single mom who claims she’s in constant pain and admits to having received almost $200K in disability payments and whose own mom describes her as slighly nuts, will find it near impossible to raise 14 kids (most of them babies) and certainly won’t be able to do so without public assistance and substantial dependence on charitable gifts from others.
Does this sound like someone capable (physically, mentally, emotionally) of raising 14 kids alone (or with her near bankrupt parents)?[/quote]
Nope.
Like I said above, she sounds like one of those crazies who collects a hundred cats in her house, except this woman wants to collect kids.
You think THAT’s harsh? Get this. Check out what the girl’s own mom said.
[quote]
Grandma Blasts Octuplet Mom: “Nadya’s Not Capable”
“The truth is Nadya’s not capable of raising 14 children.”
. . . When Nadya, 33, decided to be implanted with multiple embryos, Angela was stunned. She told RadarOnline.com: "I was very upset. She already has six beautiful children, why would she do this?
“To have them all is unconscionable to me. She really really has no idea what she’s doing to her children and to me.”
Nadya lives with Angela, a retired teacher, and Angela says Nadya contributes no money to the support of her own children. Eight people - soon to be 16 - are cramped into a small three-bedroom house and fed in shifts.
RadarOnline.com obtained exclusive photos inside the house, photos that are bound to raise more questions about Nadya’s ability to care for so many children and a RadarOnline.com reporter described the interior as “filthy”, with food on the walls.
“How she’s going to cope, I don’t know,” Angela told RadarOnline.com about her daughter. “I’m really tired of taking care of the six children and need her to think about how she’ll provide for all these children.”
. . . That doctor’s decision to perform the in vitro has left the octuplets grandmother furious. “I’m really angry about that,” she told RadarOnline.com.
Angela also voiced her anger over Nadya’s claim she was raised in a dysfunctional family and was lonely as a child. “We raised her in a loving family and her father always spoiled her,” Angela said.
“The truth is that Nadya hasn’t worked since she started having her children,” Angela, charged, "while Ed and I battled to pay her bills.
“Nadya promised to help me with the bills, but she never has. I lost a house because of it and now I’m struggling to look after her six. We had to put in bunk beds, feed them in shifts and there’s children’s clothing piled all over the house.”
Angela told RadarOnline.com that she wasn’t at the octuplets’ birth because she was looking after the other six children. . .[/quote]
radaronline.com/exclusives/
Angela Suleman inside her home, which is already cramped with 6 children.
Somebody really screw up this time:
[quote]The California mother of octuplets already receives food stamps and disability payments to help feed and care for her six other children. Publicist Mike Furtney said Monday that Nadya Suleman receives $490 a month in food stamps.
She also receives disability payments for three of her six previous children, but Suleman did not want to disclose the nature of her children’s disabilities or the nature of those payments.
In an interview that aired Monday, Suleman told NBC “Today” show anchor Ann Curry that she does not receive welfare.
[/quote]
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/feedarticle/8350634
:fume: :raspberry:
People’s reaction to the prolific Mom tells us that they are putting the responsibility right on the money:
[quote]What surprises you most about Suleman’s story?
She has 14 children under the age of 8 121% of all votes
She is unmarried, unemployed and still having multiple children 29536% of all votes
She was receiving food stamps and federal disability when she gave birth to her octuplets 12015% of all votes
[color=#FF0000]Fertility doctors are willing to help her do this 38547% of all votes[/color]
Total Votes: 812
Started: February 9, 2009
[/quote]
http://strangeoc.freedomblogging.com/2009/02/09/just-in-octuplets-mom-gets-food-stamps-older-kids-disability/4908/
Definetively, the doctor involved did this for fame, more clients, book deals, whatever but the best interest of his patient and her offspring. What happened to “do no harm”?
And who financed this crazy pipe dream? I smell a churchy thinghie nearby…
Look, I don’t want fertility treatments to be forbidden in the US like in my country, but with irresponsible actions like these… man, maybe that is what they want. :fume:
multiple order births are said to be dangerous as many of the kids are born premature or underweight. so right there, the doctor should have known better.
I feel sorry for the grandma and the kids.
Some of the above discussion reminds me of monty python’s The Meaning of Life: Every Sperm is Sacred.
Just read this from the Yahoo article:
[quote]Angela Suleman said Nadya’s boyfriend was the biological father of all 14 children, but that she refused to marry him.
“He was in love with her and wanted to marry her,” she said. “But Nadya wanted to have children on her own.” [/quote]
??? sounds like a problem. denying their kids a father (assuming the man is not abusive, etc.) seems like the wrong thing to do on the face of it.
[quote=“Jack Burton”]Just read this from the Yahoo article:
[quote]Angela Suleman said Nadya’s boyfriend was the biological father of all 14 children, but that she refused to marry him.
“He was in love with her and wanted to marry her,” she said. “But Nadya wanted to have children on her own.” [/quote]
??? sounds like a problem. denying their kids a father (assuming the man is not abusive, etc.) seems like the wrong thing to do on the face of it.
news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090210/ap_ … xIwuoDW7oF[/quote]
Well it’s her life and her right to do with it as she pleases, and her body and her right to do with it as she pleases, so where do you go from there? She’s simply exercising two rights for which women fought for years, the right to have children without marrying, and the right to control over their capacity for reproduction. This is a success poster for the feminist movement.
On the contrary. A woman who relies on her identity on a basic biological function of reproducing without control is a big step backwards in feminism.
A woman who limits her happiness to having children is also a backlash against feminism.
A woman who does not grow as a full person, having other roles and interests besides motherhood, is also an insult to feminism.
In summary, her actions are a perversion of feminism. yes, you can choose to stay with your partner or not, yes, you can choos to have kids or not, but manipulating either of those elements into this sick parody of a family is outrageous. It is an insult to all those women who do not have those freedoms.