Looney Lowers Collective I.Q. of Entire Planet!

Nadya Suleman: Winner of our 'Useless Git of the Week' Award

A kid-crazy California single mom who already had six children gave birth to octuplets last week.

Nadya Suleman, 33, who conceived all 14 of her children through in vitro fertilization, is not married and has no visible means of support for her current family, let alone the additional eight babies that now give her enough offspring to field a football team with three substitutes. In fact, Suleman still lives with her parents. Her family has revealed that she may have serious mental-health problems.

Suleman has been obsessed with having children since she was a teenager, "but luckily she couldn't," her mother Angela Suleman said, adding, "It can't go on any longer."

While her daughter recovers, Granny is taking care of the other six children, ages 2 through 7, (And why not? Look how well Nadya turned out), at the family home in Whittier, about 15 miles east of downtown Los Angeles. She said she warned her daughter that when she gets home from the hospital, "I'm going to be gone."

The family lives in a ramshackle house--the only one on the well-kept block--with a barren front yard. A front window is held together with electrical tape. Toys, a stroller and a tricycle are strewn about.

How the heck does a woman with six children get a fertility doctor to help her have eight more?

Large multiple births "are presented on TV shows as a 'Brady Bunch' moment. They're not," fumed Arthur Caplan, bioethics chairman at the University of Pennsylvania. He noted the serious and sometimes lethal complications and crushing medical costs that often come with high-multiple births.

The case of the Suleman octuplets is now sending shockwaves through the medical fertility community. Reputable doctors can't understand how a healthy mother-of-six could have been allowed to have fertility treatment that resulted in octuplets without serious questions arising about the mother's mental health, her capacity to raise such a large family or the huge medical dangers involved in giving birth to so many babies at once.

Dr. David Adamson, former president of the American Society of Reproductive Medicine, said he was bracing for some backlash against his specialty. In 30 years of practice, "I have never provided fertility treatment to a woman with six children," or ever heard of a similar case, said Adamson, director of Fertility Physicians of Northern California.

Women seeking fertility treatment are routinely asked to give a detailed history of prior pregnancies and births, and "it's a very realistic question to ask about someone who has six children: How does this fit into the concept of requiring fertility treatment?" Adamson said.

Professional guidelines generally restrict the number of embryos to one or two to avoid dangerous multiple pregnancies.

"The cost of taking care of multiples is huge," said Dr. Vicken Sahakian, director of the Pacific Fertility Center in Los Angeles. "It's not going to finish when the babies go home. There's a high likelihood they're going to have [long-term] medical and psychological handicaps."

Several doctors said it is not their role to dictate family size.

"I am not a policeman for reproduction in the United States. My role is to educate patients," said a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at a New York university.

One doctor who has fertility clinics in Los Angeles, Las Vegas and New York, countered: "Who am I to say that six is the limit? There are people who like to have big families."

In so absolving themselves of the need to exercise anything resembling good judgment, doctors bring to mind the definition of the difference between a moral man and an ethical man: The moral man knows it is immoral to sleep with another man's wife and does not. The ethical man knows it is immoral to sleep with another man's wife but does so anyway.

The births were a hot topic of conversation on the Internet, with many people incredulous that a woman with six children would try to have more--and that a doctor would help her do so. Some criticized the doctor and suggested that the mother would be overwhelmed trying to raise her brood and would end up relying on public support.


When Nadya Suleman's father, Edward, briefly emerged from the house he shares with his daughter and her enormous brood, he did not appear full of the joys of enlarging his family with more grandchildren. "I wish it happens to you people, so you go through hell," he snapped at the media throng as he unloaded shopping bags from his car. It was later revealed that Edward was considering going back to his native Iraq.

Gee, what a wonderful, loving atmosphere these kids are going to grow up in, huh? Mom's nuts, Grandma can't raise normal children and Grumps Gramps is hot-footing it to the Middle-East where all he has to contend with are suicide bombers.

Where is Mom going to get enough breasts to feed eight kids, anyway? And can you imagine changing all those diapers every couple of hours? Oh, the profanity!

Now, I'm not against in-vitro fertilization, but on an overcrowded planet of well over six billion people--at least a billion of whom are starving according to statistics--I think there should be reasonable, minimum standards for granting the procedure:

• Both parents must score at least 110 on a well-designed I.Q. test, (Yes, yes, I know--there will be people with the I.Q. of a potted geranium who will howl bloody murder at this, but who really cares what stupid people think? It's bad enough they're allowed to drive and vote.) Note: I use the word think here in it's loosest form.
  
• Both parents must be able to properly pronounce the word nuclear.
• Both parents must sign--in blood--a legal document stating that at least 50% of their offsprings' education will concentrate on math and science and that they will not expose said children to the teachings of violence-oriented religions except to explain why christians, jews and muslims all delight in capping each other's patooties.
• Both parents must agree to teach their offspring how to properly pronounce the word nuclear.

We're certainly not going to see any rocket scientists out of Nadya's litter. The best we can hope for is that they all turn out to be sterile so they can't pee in the gene pool.