Just for the record.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28939439/

http://www.newsweek.com/id/182355

So now the truth about this octuplet mess is starting to leak out, as the truth inevitably does, and I have to say I am pretty horrified at this turn of events. Initially, I was thinking, well, this woman must have gone to pretty serious lengths to either get pregnant or maintain a pregnancy. Just from having friends who have gone through various kinds of fertility therapies I understand that not every embryo in an IVF situation takes, or not every monthly Clomid cycle will ultimately end in a multiple birth. Chances are better, sure, but it's not a guarantee. So when the octuplet story initially broke, I imagined that this woman was childless, the clock was clanging, her doctor was perhaps a little more aggressive than I would have wanted (but everyone likes the doctor they like)....and she ended up with 8, and for a lot of reasons, many of which I don't personally understand, she decided to carry them all, presumably because she wanted to (in her mind) maximize her chances of having any babies, and probably for some religious reasons thrown in.

Oh, how wrong I was.

This woman has six living children. It wasn't that she had six pregnancies and lost them. No, no. She has delivered six living human beings. They are living in her house. She isn't childless. She is the exact opposite of childless. She has 200% more children than I do, right now. And yet she sought fertility treatments? And some clown who probably bought his medical degree from some school in Granada gave it to her? And gave her EIGHT EMBRYOS right off the bat? For what? To prove it could be done? To put this woman in a position of having FOURTEEN CHILDREN UNDER THE AGE OF SEVEN? Does anyone else see how utterly insane and unworkable this situation is?

I had twins. It wasn't eight. It wasn't even three. It was two. And Ellie was 15.5 months old when they were born. And I will tell you right now that it's a good thing I took lots of pictures the first year of the twins' life, because I almost remember nothing from it. There were plenty of days where I had 2 hours' sleep, for days in a row, for weeks in a row. Helen couldn't digest anything with lactose in it and until we switched her to soy she never slept more than 45 minutes straight for about 8 weeks. You have no idea how horrible it is to have a premature baby who can't, won't sleep. And then Emma was on a completely different schedule (and I was nursing her) and let's not forget Ellie, who still was a baby herself. And I had lots of help, paid, unpaid, related, unrelated but might as well be. I wasn't trying to do it by myself, although Bill did have to go back to work and I had to figure it out. I didn't go to the grocery store with all three of them until the twins were about 6 months old. I didn't really go anywhere for about six months because the twins were small, I needed to avoid the possibility of RSV, and Ellie wasn't a confident walker, so how was I going to manage in public? We easily did 30 to 40 diapers a day some days for a long time. Formula is $25 a can--and one can maybe lasted us a week? I don't even remember. The Target bills were just horrific.

And here's the upside--my twins were a decent size for their gestational age (4.9 and 4.5, in birth order) and had no medical problems. None. Helen came home at a week. Emma had one episode of heart arrythmia and had to stay in the hospital five extra days. That was it. No GI tubes, no heart monitors, no nothing. My c-section was standard, nonemergent, and I recovered normally. Yet I have met women at the rehab hospital where Ellie gets OT who had twins the same gestational week (33.5 weeks) whose children have cerebral palsy, are deaf, have seizures, had major heart defects, had collapsed lung, you name it. One woman lost one of her twins to bowel necrosis and the living child has epilepsy. This is aside from any trouble the mothers had after delivery, like hemorraging or other complications. And all I did was walk away with two super healthy kids, typically developing, and sassy as hell. I can't explain it. That's the miracle part, for me.

But what has happened in California...I don't think I would call it a miracle. I don't think I know what to call it. I think some serious investigating needs to be done into this doctor's decisionmaking process. I definitely think social services needs to be on call to get this family on track, because they do not even know what they are in for. Would I give this woman a psych eval? You betcha.

Just because science makes it possible for something to be done does not mean it should be done. I don't feel good about anything in this octuplet story. I don't think babies should have to start out life at under 2 pounds, in incubators, unable to be nursed or held. In a single or even twin situation, sometimes that happens, although doctors are really good at getting that NOT to happen. In a super multiple situation, over five or six babies, it's sort of a given. Is that fair to these children, to put them at risk for stroke, cognitive delay, major organ malfunction? Just because science said, We can do this?