8 Babies, A Million Opinions

I'm sure everyone has heard about the ongoing saga of the woman who delivered octuplets on Monday. The fact that eight babies came out of one woman is mind-boggling enough, it's only happened one other time that we know of in the U.S. But the controversy that continued to swirl around this large delivery confuses me even more.

Only later did we learn that the mother of this recent litter was already a mother of six, making her the proud parent of, I think buttload is the technical term, of kids. 14 children.

Ho

Lee

Crap!

Beyond the seeming insanity of wanting more than a carload of offspring, it has to be said that it is this woman's right to have as many kids as she wants, and if her & her husband can afford them, more power to them. It is none of our business how many kids they have or wish to have, a fact that seems to escape the media and most of the public.

Many have criticized the mom's choice to add eight more kids to an already larger-than-average family. But I will submit to you that there's nothing wrong with having a large family if you are prepared to deal with the challenges inherent to large broods of young-uns. If fact, some extra-large families - like the famous Duggar family - have made a science of stripping away all the unnecessary and worthless junk we give our kids and are raising an (albeit huge) family of well-behaved and hard-working kids. It's all a matter of commitment, if you want enough kids to fill a school bus...and you are willing to make the sacrifices required, God bless you and your legion of progeny.

But further ridiculous is the criticism of this mother's decision to have all of her in-vitro fertilized embryos implanted in her womb and her decision to carry all of the fetuses to term. How shocking that many of those now standing in judgment of this woman would tell me that I have no right to an opinion as to whether they had an abortion. But when this woman makes a choice not to employ practices that she may have equated with abortion, suddenly she is insane, or at the very least reckless.

What happened to "my body, my choice"? This woman chose to have a number of her eggs fertilized in-vitro, chose to have all of the resulting embryos implanted in her uterus (the normal procedure is to implant only a few), and she chose to have all of her babies. If a woman's decision to have end a pregnancy is between her & her doctor...then why doesn't the same rule apply here? Does "Pro-Choice" now mean that the woman's choice is subject to the qualms of others? If so, everyone really needs to lay off he Pro-Life crowd for having qualms of their own.

I say we leave this woman and her kids alone, unless it's to volunteer to change diapers. Any takers?

Nolanbuck