OK, Nadya Suleman, 33, of Whittier, CA, gave birth to 8 children via scheduled C-section on January 26, 2009.
Octuplets.
That’s 8 more kids than I have. Her fist children? Oh, no… she has six (SIX!!!!) other children. That’s right. She’s 33 years old, and has 14 children. The Wikipedia article on the octuplets, which also goes into Nadya’s personal life and living situation, reads like a who’s-who punch list of symptoms requiring immediate and permanent institutionalization.
Mental case? You decide:
- Lives with her parents and her 6 children in a 1500 square foot, 3 bedroom tract home
- One of her pre-octuplet children is autistic
- Her family (parents?) filed for bankruptcy (claiming $1M in liabilities) and abandoned another home in late 2007
- Already having six children, she sought fertility treatments to have more.
- Her family is asking $2M from media interviews and commercial sponsors to help raise her 14 children.
- She now plans to embark on a career… wait for it…. as a “television childcare expert”.
And now, and Open Letter to Nadya Suleman
Dear Nadya,
Nadya, you’re an idiot. You’re a lunatic. You’re the sort of person who’s bringing the human race to its knees. I don’t know what psychological issue you’re trying to quell by hoarding children, but what ever it is, seek help for it, and STOP BREEDING!!! If you choose to have more children in one birth than you can carry without special equipment, you’re an irresponsible imbecile. If you choose to bear more children than you can breastfeed simultaneously, you’re signing the rest up for a life of disappointment.
How can you possibly hope to feed, clothe, bathe, change, educate, and love all these children? There are only 24 hours in a day, and, eventually the world will lose interest in the fact that you have CHOSEN to have so many children. You will have to find a way to PAY for all the things your 14 children need.
And, since no one else seems to want to tell you this, I guess it’s my job. You are a cancer on humanity. In your lifetime, the human population of the Earth has jumped by almost 50%. There are people starving all over the world. The soil can’t support the necessary crops, the rains can’t provide enough water, and there’s no where near enough social support to sustain your level of breeding across the population.
What’s worse, is that you will receive media attention. The news media wouldn’t dare come right out and say, “She’s a dangerous and irresponsible lunatic, and all her children should be taken away.” Anything short of that will come across as either glorification or promotion as a sideshow freak. The women seeking glory will take away the glory message, and the women seeking attention at any cost will take away the freak message. Then, when the media’s lost interest in you, the checks will stop coming in. You will have gotten used to the rate of income, and will have squandered all that money on things you could never afford on your own, and a lifestyle you could never maintain without subsidy. You will be an otherwise forgotten footnote in medical history and your children will carry the mark of your idiocy to their graves.
You are sick, and need to stop having children.
Sincerely,
Paul Tourville
And now, and open letter to Kaiser Permanente
To whom it may concern,
I understand that the Hippocratic oath demands that you do no harm. In engineering there is an acronym: TINSTAAFL, which means, “There is no such thing as a free lunch.” This means that if you want light it will cost you electric current. If you want heat, it will cost you fuel.
To support Ms. Suleman in her quest to be The Old Woman Who Lived In A Shoe is irresponsible, unethical, and just plain wrong.
I shudder to think what the birth and post-partum care bill (not the co-pay, the total bill) for this therapeutic misadventure will turn out to be, but I’m sure it will be in the millions. Who pays for that? The rest of us. There’s some harm.
While in the hospital, Ms. Suleman and her litter will be taking limited care resources from other more sensible people having only one child at a time. There’s some harm.
Ms. Suleman will then go home to her 1,500 square foot, three-bedroom home in Whittier, with her 14 children and 2 parents, and do what?! Give interviews? This woman has been pregnant for the last 7 years. What means of support for this brood does she possess? There aren’t enough waking hours in the day to care properly for 14 children as a single mother. She can’t possibly work, because she can’t possibly afford daycare. There’s some harm.
Ms. Suleman will put her neglected, ill-nourished children into public schools, where at least some of them are bound to be behavior problems, again, taking resources and opportunities away from the children of more sensible and responsible parents. There’s harm.
Eventually, the Suleman children will make their way into the workforce, seeking jobs that don’t exist. There’s some harm.
The Suleman children will, most likely, decide to each marry, and/or “start a family”, starting the cycle all over again. There’s some harm.
Finally, the Suleman children will age, and begin to put a strain on the healthcare system, requiring bushel-baskets of prescription drugs, likely for decades. Where does the money for that come from? Still more harm.
As politically incorrect as it may be to tell you this, you’ve done plenty of harm, by supporting Ms. Suleman in this effort, and not denying her fertility treatments after her second child.
Clearly, Ms. Suleman is not competent to take on a car loan, let alone raise 14 children on her own. In coddling and facilitating her through this narcissistic exercise (doing no harm in the micro context), you have doomed the rest of us to shoulder the burden of the care and feeding of her spawn (doing immeasurable harm in tha larger context), as well as having encouraged other, similarly inclined women, to pursue “love” and attention through competitive breeding.
You are guilty of malpractice, for you have harmed society, and recklessly endangered the human race by setting an example, and holding up the lunatic, Ms. Suleman, as a hero.
Shame on you.
Paul Tourville
And now, an open letter to the media
To whom it may concern,
Resist the urge. I beg you. Do not pay this woman a dime. You should be like a National Geographic expedition, hiding in a blind, using long lenses to document, but not interfere with the goings-on. Nadya Suleman should be treated like a lioness on the savanna, struggling to feed, shelter and raise her brood, succeeding or failing on her wits and merits alone.
To pay her is to interfere. It’s not news, then. It’s a freakshow. The lives of 14 children are at stake, but so is the life of the nation. To make this any more of a story than the face transplant in Ohio, a couple months ago, is to blow it out of proportion.
Coverage of this event should be little more than this:
“Octuplets. Wow. That’s a lot of babies. In other news…”
…unless, you’re willing to expose and explore the unsavory underside of excessive fertility… the impact on diet, psychology, education, healthcare and so on… The fact that there’s already far too many people in the world… that kind of thing… unless you’re willing to go there, this story belongs right next to the water-skiing squirrel.
I think the fact that she has retained a PR firm says it all. She has geared this up to be an industry. If you show up to feed at the trough, you’re all suckers.
Sincerely,
Paul Tourville
