there was a young woman from boobville ...

Some of the crap that is coming out about this woman is ... wow.

Fox News' morning show (I know, I know - just go with me on this) just had a fertility specialist on who said point blank that implanting eight embryos in a woman who already had a proven track record with IVF treatments goes against pretty much every published ethical guideline in the specialty.

They asked him about the grandmother's statement that her daughter wanted "just one more girl" and he pretty much called "bullshit". According to this guy, with her medical history the most they should have implanted - even with frozen embryos - was two if she was just looking for one more child.

The thing he did go on to talk about, which is what's making me uncomfortable, is that they are her embryos, and as long as she could find somebody to cover the procedure she pretty much had the right to keep coming back until they had all turned into bouncing baby tax deductions. The ethical issue from the medical side is apparently the number that were implanted for a single pregnancy, not *insert my personal opinion* that the woman is an idiot suffering from a terminal case of "baby rabies".

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See, I myself have no problem with a single woman having a lot of kids without a husband, providing she's emotionally, mentally and financially stable, she has the support of her family or friends who are willing to help with such a large brood, she has a secure home that's got enough room, she has them in as healthy a manner as possible, and she's able to devote the time to care for each of them individually when they need it. This chick appears to fit none of those criteria. AT ALL. (Quite frankly, I can't imagine many women are unless they're rich homebodies who don't sleep much.)

And I don't buy that there's a fertility doctor at all. I feel like the story starts to lose credibility the more people involved we assume are batshit and corrupt, and it also doesn't make sense that any doctor would have had the balls to put that many embryos in her uterus. If you presented that situation to me, as someone who usually follows these stories pretty closely, I'd say it was the result of fertility drugs, not IVF. It makes infinitely more sense than this nutjob finding an equally nutty doctor to do the procedure. After all, it's not like she wasn't in a position to get her hands on those drugs.

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anne-jumps.livejournal.com

I haven't had enough tea to really follow what's going on, but.... So she probably has been using fertility drugs from the Internet this whole time? What do Iraqis she may have been married to have to do with anything?

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Well, the story is still that she used IVF, but if she did nearly the entire medical community is agreed that it's either gross medical malpractice by the doctor involved, since she should have only had two embryos put into her rather than eight, or an outright lie on her part, since in cases of higher-order multiples this high it's fertility drugs that force the ovaries to dump out eggs that cause this sort of thing. (My personal bet is that it's going to be discovered that either she stole fertility drugs from the clinic she worked at or that there's an internet invoice for Clomid out there somewhere with her name on it.)

And she wasn't married to an Iraqi. She was only married once, about a decade ago and not for very long. (It appears to be before any of her kids were born.) Her dad is Iraqi. Where it gets weird is that the name listed for the father of some if not all of the kids on their birth certificates is David Soloman. Her father's name is Edward Doud Suleman. Doud is a Muslim version of David and Suleman/Soloman ... well.

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anne-jumps.livejournal.com

I'm also hearing that the sperm donor was a neighbor who asked her to stop using his sperm after he got married, but she didn't...? This is all kinds of messed up.

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Oh, and there's a quote going around that says she has plans to become a television childcare expert. Yeah, good luck with that.

I have a feeling if she does get Diane Sawyer or Oprah to take her on, they're both going to rake her over the coals. And I'll bet she'll expect them to kiss her ass and then get blindsided.

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I'm waiting for one of the more radical pro-life groups to take her under their wing.

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Oh, they've already picked her up as a hero on the pro-life blogs on LJ. Which is great, see, because at the rate it's going, she's going to end up turning out to be a fraud and they'll hopefully look like jackasses.

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wiesbaden.livejournal.com

It's actually not entirely uncommon in some parts of the world for an unwed mother to list her own father's name on the birth certificate of her child, so they don't have to leave anything blank; I did immigration work in Nigeria, and it was a relatively common practice. Not to say that it didn't wig me the hell out the first time I came across an instance...

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This chick appears to fit none of those criteria. AT ALL. (Quite frankly, I can't imagine many women are unless they're rich homebodies who don't sleep much.)

We're totally in agreement here. My issue is that this is where the idea of reproductive freedom gets tricky. The fertility doctor is right. They are her embryos(assuming the IVF story was true) - it should be up to her what to do with them.

Yes, she's an idiot who doesn't meet even the most basic criteria of responsible parenting, but is there a situation where we can ethically step in and say "all right, we're shutting your womb down"?

I don't know. I'm just babbling about an anciliary issue that's probably going to be bothering me for days.

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It's bothering me too! I mean, I totally agree that this woman is a wackjob and irresponsible and I feel unbelievably bad about her kids, but...

How could this have been prevented, without the presence of rules that I would find abhorent if they were applied to other, non-insane women? I mean, there could be SPECIFIC rules, I guess, but even they get dodgy - we could have a law against implanting more than a certain number of embryos at a time, but what would the justification for that law be? It's the woman's body, and I think she should have the absolute right to do what she wants with it. And I'm really uncomfortable with the idea of saying that she doesn't have a right to the embryos, because I think that leads down a path of either a) governments claiming control over things they don't own, or b) treating embryos as things that somehow have some sort of human rights, which is obviously a really dangerous way to go in terms of other aspects of women's reproductive freedom.

Anyway, I didn't mean to hijack the post, I just wanted to let you know that you're not alone - I don't see a simple solution to this nonsense either.

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what would the justification for that law be?

The health and safety of the mother AND the fetuses. They already have rules like this on the books in the health profession. Considering her age and her success with IVF before (if she's telling the truth) the doctor would have been irresponsible to put anything more than two embryos in her.

There is no justifiable reason to put eight embryos into anyone. Even if the mother wants to. If someone walks into a fertility office and says, "Put eight embryos into my uterus," there's something wrong with them. Anybody who gives a damn about the child or children they want to carry knows better. The higher the multiples, the higher the risk. Even twins is a huge concern. Octuplets is virtually unheard of, and it hasn't been completely successful in the past. Look at the Chukwu octuplets. They were the other octuplets born alive in this country, and they lost one a week after birth. They're getting better at treating children this premature, but having higher-order multiples guarantees a premature delivery in nearly every case.

A woman should always have a choice whether or not to carry a child. But the problem here isn't the number of children she has, it's the number of children she had at one time. It's life-threatening to her and to the fetuses. It's not unreasonable for there to be rules to protect both the health of the mother and her child/ren by restricting the number of embryos allowed during IVF.

Of course, I still don't believe she had those embryos put in through IVF.

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I don't deny at all that this specific case is insane, and the woman is...something else...but are you comfortable with there being a rule or a law that says that a doctor gets to determine what's best for a woman, even if it means overriding her wishes about her own body? It's too paternalistic for me. I don't disagree that, in this situation, the woman is nuts, but I worry about setting a precedent.

I mean, as far as I'm concerned, there's no justifiable reason to get certain piercings. They're a bit risky, and they're not my thing, so, no. I don't think people should get them. But that doesn't give me the right to say that people CAN'T get them, and it doesn't give the government that right. The government also doesn't have the right to prevent people from smoking or drinking to excess or back-country skiing or whatever other stupid things we get up to. So I don't think we can legitimately have a law to keep the woman from risking her life if she thinks it's the thing to do.

So if we can't take steps to stop the woman from hurting herself, maybe we can take steps to stop the woman from hurting her children. The problem is that the embryos aren't children yet, they're still embryos, and I think there are serious problems with treating them like people. I mean, it's in the best interest of all future children to be carried to full term, but I still support a woman's right to abort them while they're still in the embryonic stage. If I use that logic, don't I have to support the rights of this mother to do what she wants with the embryos at this stage?

Like I said, in practical, concrete terms, this case is crazy, and the woman was unbelievably irresponsible and screwed up. I just think maybe this is a situation where the underlying freedoms are so important that we have to put up with the occasional abuses of that freedom, rather than shutting down the abuses at the cost of losing some of the rights.

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Here's the thing - all insanity aside, if you remove the documented health issue of implanting eight embryos at once, is there a problem with her going back four times over however many years and having multiple sets of twins?

I mean, discounting the fact that the woman is clearly insane and needs to have DCF called on her ass, and...Gods why can't these kind of situations be more black and white?

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Oh, yeah, I'm totally with you. I don't see a reason for her to do what she did. But I also don't see a reason for people to smoke, or join the army, or any other thing where, to me, the pain outweighs the gain. That doesn't give me the right to substitute my judgement for someone else's. And it doesn't give the government that right.

It's kinda like the freedom of speech thing - 'I may disagree with what you say, but I defend your right to say it.' I ABSOLUTELY disagree with what she did, but...

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laughingrat.livejournal.com

I don't deny at all that this specific case is insane, and the woman is...something else...but are you comfortable with there being a rule or a law that says that a doctor gets to determine what's best for a woman, even if it means overriding her wishes about her own body? It's too paternalistic for me. I don't disagree that, in this situation, the woman is nuts, but I worry about setting a precedent.

Or renewing a practice we rightfully threw aside! There was a trend in the early to mid 20th century of forced sterilization of any woman who wasn't middle- or upper-class, white, didn't toe the line, or was mentally "unsound." Would you want some 1930s southern cracker deciding whether or not you're a "good woman" and get to keep your womb or not? *shudder* There's some famous cases of, shall we say, wrongful diagnosis of retardation or some such excuse for forced hysterectomy--in one case, the woman had been raped by a rich family's son and since she was poor and they weren't, it was their word against hers and she was declared an idiot and "sterilized." That case alone is horrible, but when I think of all the other poor, Black, Native American, and other women who were victims of this...good god.

So, yeah. We went there once, and it was an evil thing to do, and I for one don't want to see us go back. I agree with you. Let's not do this again.

Not to go on and on, but for folks who haven't heard of this practice, here's a couple places to start:

Forced Sterilization article at Wikipedia
Article about Carrie Buck, with better details than I was able to provide above
Picture of adorable rat that will help you recover from the above two links

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...but are you comfortable with there being a rule or a law that says that a doctor gets to determine what's best for a woman, even if it means overriding her wishes about her own body?

No. But a piercing is VASTLY different from eight embryos.

No one told this woman she couldn't have IVF. No one told her she had to selectively reduce whether she wanted to or not. No one stood in her way. And there's nothing wrong with that. (She's nuts and shouldn't be allowed to keep any of those kids, but that's another story.)

What IS wrong is the doctor (if he even exists) who did a costly procedure that was almost guaranteed to fail. It's a miracle it worked at all given that many fetuses. This isn't like body modification, which to my knowledge rarely if ever kills or seriously harms anyone. This is more like a doctor putting three kidneys into the body of a woman who only needs one transplant. That's overkill, and it's probably not going to work.

A responsible doctor would sit her down and say, "I understand you want me to put eight embryos in, but you're almost certainly going to miscarry." You might as well flush your money down the toilet. If a woman wants a baby, no one should stop her. But this isn't the way. This is the only time all eight babies have survived. EVER. She can do whatever she wants, but the doctor's the one who has to do the IVF procedure. And there's a better chance of it being a successful procedure if there are fewer embryos. No one's saying she has to throw away the other embryos, or that she couldn't have had them later. (She shouldn't because she's cracked, but still.)

We're talking about a woman who has five successful pregnancies previously. If her mother is right, she only wanted one more baby. Again, no reason there should have been eight embryos in that woman. NONE. There's never any reason for eight embryos to be implanted in anyone.

However, like I said, I don't think this has anything to do with an issue of freedom of choice for two reasons -- she had the IVF and the resulting babies and no one stopped her in either case, and I still don't believe there was IVF. It's far more likely there were fertility drugs at play, and to be honest I don't believe there was a doctor involved either. After all, it's been a week -- you'd think someone would have found the guy by now.

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No, fair enough, this case may be a red herring. And you're right, no one DID interfere with her rights in this case - I just worry that people are going to try to use this as a reason to interfere with the next woman's rights.

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And yeah, she definitely brings up my biggest remaining question - if all fourteen of these children *were* conceived through IVF...what insurance company agreed to pay for all this?

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That's another reason why I doubt her story. I seriously think we're going to come to find out that all of this is bullshit.

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leaveoutalltherest

Yeah, her reality show is going to be someone doing a special fifteen years down the line of her in a psych ward while her kids run wild.

If she doesn't end up getting them all taken away in the next two years.

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laughingrat.livejournal.com

I noticed that she made sure to turn off comments on that post, so I'll remark on a massive logic fail here.

One note, I think I know what I am talking about when I say that NO Muslim/Iraqi father would put up with his daughter having out of wedlock after out of wedlock child. Find me one that would and I will EAT MY HAT. This is absolutely culturally TABOO!

Of course it's taboo, but so what? They're in California, not Iraq (or Egypt, or Somalia, or Iran, or Yemen, or...). We have laws here. Women are just about considered to be human beings here. What's he gonna do to prevent her having baby after baby? Drag her into the town square and have the men stone her to death? LOGIC FAIL.

I actually think the poster's right that something wacky's going on. No question there. I just thought that was a poor argument for it. :-D

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