Controversy surrounding recent octuplet birth in California

I feel sorry for these kids...because others are going to be reluctant to help now.

 

Couldn't child services take some of them away? A situation like that would appear criminal.

 

They should go to DC and ask for a bailout...

 

A little more controversy...maybe:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20090130/sc_livescience/8isenoughthelimitstohumanreproduction

Eight kids at once. The mind boggles. The mind is also pretty creeped out by the thought of one tiny baby after another coming out of a woman as if she were a mouse.

It's great those octuplets are here and healthy, but really, humans aren't designed to have litters.

It's basic energetics. Every individual has only so much energy. Some energy is spent staying alive - that is, finding food and not being somebody else's food - and what's left over can be spent on reproduction. In other words, there are limits to reproduction.

Of course, the various slices of that reproductive energy pie also vary between males and female of all species. Males don't gestate or lactate so they pass on the most genes by flitting from female to female making as many babies as they can, and then walking away. The female reproductive pie is much more complex. There are costs to pregnancy, lactation for mammals, and then whatever else is needed to bring a kid up to sexual maturity so they can pass on genes as well.

But there are all sorts of ways, from an evolutionary point of view, for females of a species to distribute that energy and bring up babies successfully. She might have as many babies as she can in one shot, litters that is, and have them as often as possible. For that kind of female, reproduction is an assembly line of cheap production per kid. Or a female might opt for the other end of the scale and make one baby at a time and wait for a very long time to see if that one investment pays off.

Obviously, humans are on slow side of the baby production continuum. Evolution has selected for this path because there are features of our species that require great investment by mothers. Human infants might have big brains compared to other mammals, but they need to get even bigger once outside the womb. And so human infants are actually born neurologically unfinished. They can't cling, sit up, feed themselves, or run from predators. And so the very nature of what it takes to be an adult human puts constraints on how many children a mother can have at a time.

Take a look at a naked woman and see for yourself how many babies a woman is designed to care for - two, at most.

In fact our babies need so much that human fathers, too, have been selected to stop fooling around and to stay at home with one female if they want to see their genes go forward. The evolution of the human family is not about men and women deciding to make a commitment; it's really about the dependency of our children.

And we are so used to this system that we can't help but stare in awe at twins and scream in shock at octuplets. It doesn't seem right to have that many kids at once because it isn't right in the evolutionary sense. That family will surely have help beyond the mother and father, and they will all probably have a great time, but chances are it will be a very long time before that mother reproduces again.

 

Yes it is true and she has more kids than what is reported

The doctors making the decisions to do these implants have to be insane

The entire hospital is up in arms about it too... everyone is talking about it including people who dont even work directly with patients.

 

my boss knows this family his son goes to the same school as the the oldest of the 14 kids (his son is about to turn 8) and he has gone over to their place for a birthday party a year or two back. he didnt have the most glowing reviews about the family and has no idea how they are going to make it work.

 

I have known single child families whose parents were way over their heads.

I have known people who had 10+ siblings and appear to be perfectly normal, well adjusted adults.

 

This clown car needs to be shut down. The woman's parents must be pissed. What a zoo.

 

I can't really say anything bad about her because my grandma had 12 kids.

As for that lady with 8 babies at once, that's just crazy. She has 6 kids for a single mother and that is enough. I feel bad that her grandpa has to go back to Iraq.

 

How come I get the feeling these kids will soon be wards of the state.

 

That is one screwed up mother. What...six kids aren't enough for you? I'm not clear what her agenda is...but something stinks.

 

I know it's not really feasible, but the idea of anybody wanting to give birth having to go through the same strenuous process that is involved with adoptions to make sure they are qualified, sometimes appeals to me.

 

famine incoming.....

WTB bono to feed us

 

So she had the first 5 births immediately one after another (the kids are all one year apart). Then to top it off she goes for 2 grand slam home runs in the same day.

I might be insensitive and reading way too much into it, but it sounds like she might have some psychological problems that should be addressed. Like people who fake illnesses to go to the hospital repeatedly (don't remember the name). Maybe the attention from each birth persuades her to do another.

And this is not to judge people who have many kids. Large families were more common decades ago, and there's still many today. But in this case, considering the dire financial situation (let's be realistic), the timing, and the fertility procedure, it doesn't add up.

 

They can call her Octopussy.

 

It's funny to see all these articles asking experts to speculate on the ethics given a variety of assumptions they can't confirm. They don't know if the 6 kids are her biological kids, nor if the octoplets are IVF babies, nor what sort of support she has, nor what her name is, nor what her psychology is. But, they can speculate.