We tried to ignore Nadya Suleman, hoping she would go away. Everyone involved in that hot mess reeks of hype and dysfunction; the unmarried, unemployed 33-year-old college student with 14 kids. The doctor who did the work and the thrill-seeking media who deemed the story "OctoMom." Okay. We take it back. "OctoMom" is actually kind of funny.But still, the story is impossible to dismiss as just another Freak-of-the-Week show; one more sad example of the old irony that you need a license to fish, but any idiot can have a kid. There is an air of oppressive creepiness about Suleman's story; an epic callousness by everyone involved that touches on something deeper and more disturbing in American life.
Where to begin? Suleman claims she paid to have the 14 children conceived by in vitro fertilization with part of a $165,000 disability settlement. She got that after a back injury suffered while working at a state mental hospital. You know, kind of like how Lucky on "King of the Hill" makes a living by slipping on pee. She plans to raise the kids on $50,000 in student loans until she finishes school. Somewhere along the line, she also managed to get some plastic surgery that was, apparently, supposed to make her look like Angelina Jolie. (Which makes sense. Jolie is the patron saint of compulsive moms.)
Meanwhile, the hospital where Suleman's eight new children remain under care has applied to the State of California for help with expenses. Because, you know, California is just swimming in cash right now. Essentially, the woman's entire life is paid for by taxpayers. She's a walking bailout.
But the "welfare queen" aspect of the story is only grating. If these children had been conceived separately, with real fathers instead of a turkey-baster, no one would have noticed. Suleman is less a symbol of welfare-state madness than the more ethically complex issues engendered by the rise of fertility science. When a woman with no clear means of survival beyond the kindness of strangers can have fourteen kids, it feels like nature's most fundamental process, the act of reproduction, is being perverted somehow, fucked with for the sake of ego.
Is Suleman really so different from Alex Kuczynski; the socialite New York Times reporter who wrote exhaustively about paying a woman to bear her child? And what about the thousands of women like her; the rich, white, barren suburban ladies who hire poor, brown-skinned fertile women to carry their seed. Yeah, there's nothing unssetttling there. Don't forget about lesbian couples who want pregancy with out a penis and gay men who want kids without a womb. None of this feels like it's about nurturing kids. If people want a child to love, thousands await adoption. The obsessive baby-making is about selfishness; about people's egocentric belief that the human race won't survive without a big dollop of their DNA and having a "real child" will confer some sort of immortality.
Being a parent has evidently become an another "right," to which everyone feels entitled -- even if they don't happen to have the necessary equipment, like, say, sperm, eggs or a viable womb. On some gut-level, it all feels creepy, like we are heading for a sci-fi dystopia where people send away for kits and grow their own babies at home, like sea monkeys.
Suleman, by the way, set up a website to receive donations. She also claimed to be getting death threats and said she moved to "a secure location." You know, like Dick Cheney. She said this through her publicist. Naturally. Meanwhile, Suleman's ex-husband just announced he's releasing a sex tape of the couple on their honeymoon. Just kidding. He didn't. But would you really be that surprised if it was true?
