The last of Nadya Suleman’s octuplets has been discharged from the hospital and is now at home with his family. Following a three-month stay at Kaiser Permanente Medical Center in Bellflower, California, Jonah Angel Suleman – who weighed only a pound and a half at birth – now weighs just over four and a half pounds and has been deemed strong enough to survive outside the hospital.
“This is an historic and a joyous moment for all of us,” Kaiser Medical Center neonatologist Mandhir Gupta told People. “The birth of the octuplets on Jan. 26 was a special moment for each of the 52 doctors, nurses and other caregivers who brought them into the world. [Jonah’s release] is the culmination of that dream – eight healthy babies who are strong and ready to thrive.”
The Suleman babies’ hospital stay may be over, but the many questions raised by their birth – questions about in-vitro fertilization, medical ethics, single parenting, and welfare, just to name a few – are still raging.
Nadya Suleman, 33, has become a familiar face online as the single mother of 14 children, the oldest of whom is seven. All of her children were conceived, Suleman states, through in-vitro fertilization. Amid talk that Suleman will soon be starring in her own reality show, is trademarking the name Octomom, and has cost the La Habra police department $4,000 in overtime fees for watching over her family since their move to the neighborhood in March, it’s hard to sort out my feelings from the furor.
Suleman didn’t ask me for my opinion before she chose to have six frozen embryos implanted simultaneously (purportedly to avoid their being destroyed), but I have to wonder: If she had asked me, what would I have said? The American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM) has established guidelines for the implantation of frozen embryos, guidelines that were not followed in Suelman’s case. But who really should get the final say in the matter? The ASRM? The expectant mother? Friends, family, society, the culture at large?
“Fourteen children is too many” is a reoccurring sentiment on chat sites and blogs – especially when the mother is single and a welfare recipient. But how many children is “too many”? And for whom? Can we put a limit on the acceptable number of children to have, and still claim to be pro-life? What would a godly response be to the reproductive choices of others?
“We are gifted with children, rather than entitled to them,” Cynthia Cohen says in a recent article for Episcopal Life, “Being Fruitful But Responsible.” Cohen, of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown University, served on the Canadian Stem Cell Oversight Committee for three years. She writes:
Is it possible for us to cherish and nurture children as creatures with their own uniqueness and integrity if we deliberately have more than a dozen of them who are very young? What are the limits to God’s call to us to be fruitful and multiply? The Christian tradition teaches that we are to refrain from using our children as mere instruments to fulfill our own desires. They are not our possessions, products or projects; they are our trusts …. Children are ends in themselves whom we are to cherish and care for as God’s creatures in light of our capabilities and circumstances.
In all the questions raised by the Suleman octuplets’ birth, Cohen’s thoughts seem like a good place to start our own response.
