Mark Greif - Octomom and the Politics of Babies (Kindle Single)

Octomom and the Politics of Babies

The news crews that arrived at Nadya Sulemans parents house, where the young mother lived, in January 2009, thought they were reporting on a different kind of story than the one we now know they got. They were prepared to celebrate the minor miracle of only the second set of octuplets ever to have been born alive in the United States. A few days later, Nadya, a.k.a. Octomom, would become the most hated woman in America, largely through the medias tender ministry. Today, two years later, shes still in the tabloids and celebrity glossies, although, in the way of these things, Octomom now seems most famous for being in tabloids. If her new reality television specials ever begin airing in the USfilming began in fall 2009, with production managed by the makers of the weight-loss competition The Biggest Loser shell be another celebrity floating free of her original context, like our defunct satellites orbiting Earth.

I think Octomom deserves better, in the midst of our compulsive forgetfulness, as perhaps the only major nonBernard Madoff, ostensibly nonfinancial story to stir the boiling pitch of the nations passions in those historic months, September 2008 to March 2009, when American news outlets tried to cope with the greatest financial collapse since the Great Depression, enacting their own greatest moral collapse since the 2003 Iraq War. In those months, not just the red-faced ranters of Fox or MSNBC, but even the purveyors of puffs and gossip at People and Us Weekly , had an obligation, before saying much else, to acknowledge the meltdown of American capitalismif only because they were addressing audiences who were newly unemployed, foreclosed on, picked clean of retirement funds, and blamed for their poor judgment despite twenty years of skys-the-limit blandishments and structural mischief by finance architects. The octuplets were supposed to be a distraction: an oasis in the midst of the days gloomy news of AIG perfidy, mortgage defaults, bank closures, toxic assets, and spiking unemployment. Instead, the camera teams that camped on the lawn of the nice one-story house in Whittier, California, in the glitter of LA winter, got a living metaphor for the crisis.

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On the 26th of January, the eight babies were born, by cesarean section, ranging in size from one pound, twelve ounces, to two pounds, nine ounces. Seven had been found on ultrasound. The eighth, emerging as a little hand clinging to a doctors latex glove, was a surprise.

Who was Nadya Suleman? Not so unreasonable a person: darkhaired, 33 years old, Caucasianesque, with that slightly ethnic, Coppertone cast thats the norm for new celebs originating in Southern California; well-spoken enough, and not obviously unattractivea figure, that is, that television could take seriously. She had a college degree, a former life as a medical technician, and credits from graduate work in counseling. She was churchgoing, shampooeda slightly droopy flower raised in the warm air of Orange County, who had always known her passion in life was to be a mom.

Who was the dad? Here was trouble. A single mother nowadays is a media madonna: righteous in the face of the absentee father, and promised our support. She becomes a harpy if we learn she pushed the father away. It was tougher for the reporters to explain that in this case, as they quickly learned, there had never been a father, nor any thought of one. The babies had been created in vitro and implanted as embryos. The search turned quickly to a male donor. The sperm had originated somewhere. Perhaps the octuplets begetter could be found? (On cable news, odd debates took place on whether an unwitting donor could be made responsible for the childrens upkeep.) The Suleman family said the donor was David Solomon, nicely linking Nadyas brood to a Charles Murrayish Bell Curve fantasy of the intellectual superiority of Ashkenazi Jews (had she given life to a race of supergeniuses?), until everybody noticed that this patrimony was just a transformation of Nadyas own last name. No such father could be located among all the David Solomons of Los Angeles. Instead of a father, the octuplets had a doctor, Michael Kamravaa Beverly Hills fertility clinic director with a controversial IVF practice near Rodeo Drive. Thus the shadow of Hollywood vanity crept over Nadya Sulemans story. At her request, she said, Dr. Kamrava had implanted six embryos in Sulemans womb, a number wildly above all professional recommendations. Suleman claimed two had split, adding pairs of twins.

Then it emerged that the house Nadya lived in was being foreclosed on. This made it like everyone elses house, it seemed, in certain towns, from Stockton to Bakersfield, all over California, where the state couldnt fund its budget anymore, and would soon be issuing IOUs even to the people who filled its soda machines. Could Octomom also be a victim of the financial crisis? Well, she had no job to have lost. She hadnt for a while. The Los Angeles Times reported $2,379 a month in federal public assistance and $490 in food stamps, information available in public records. Suleman played down the food stamps. As for the public assistance, it was for her disabled children, three of her first sixher children before the octuplets. It seemed that Dr. Kamrava had performed other multiple-implantation procedures for Nadya in recent years. That half her previous babies arrived with birth defects, physical or mental, was not an entirely unlikely outcome when more than one or two were gestated at a time. A womb provides only limited real estate for the development of bodies and brains. And Nadya, like the more celebrated Sarah Palin, was opposed on principle to selective reduction, that is, the abortion of some among multiple developing embryos or fetuseseven embryos or fetuses that are identified in utero as less likely to survive, and more likely to be underdeveloped or disabled at birtheven though to do so would give the others a better chance. This detail was passed over lightly in the press, in recognition of sensitivities about the unborn.

Few commentators, for that matter, explained why Nadya had undertaken the pregnancy leading to octuplets in the first place. This was an odd consequence of the conjunction of Sulemans pro-life views and her doctors unusual implantation methods. Dr. Kamrava supposedly informed her that multiple extra embryos created for her earlier IVF treatments were going to be thawed and disposed of (again, not an uncommon situation). As Suleman explained: Because theyre frozen, doesnt mean theyre not alive. And theyre stillthey are alive. Theyre human lives! Which meant she ought to help them to a better place. While the Catholic Church opposes IVF because it creates embryos outside of the mothers womb, most Protestant anti-abortion groups dont, and may even propose it as a resort for couples who want to attain the ultimate goods of Protestant anti-abortion ideology: babies, and the part Suleman skippedtraditional biparental family. Her church, she said, was the Evangelical megachurch at Calvary Chapel Golden Springs, average attendance 13,000, but no staff member would confirm her as a congregantthe pastors went so far as to deny her in multiple press releasesand she had apparently come away with her own syncretistic consumer theology.

The human uplift story unwound as rapidly as the markets had done six months earlier. Fury emerged even before journalists established that the seed capital for Sulemans mother-career had come from more than $160,000 in disability payments. Which she had received for a back injury, it turned out, she had endured as a psychiatric medical technician, when a state hospital inmate overturned a wooden desk on Nadya in a riot. (Anyone could see she was now strong enough to carry a bellyful of kids, and swan around for Ann Curry on NBC.) The talk-show hosts went mental once public assistance was the red cape flourished before their horns. They might pay $700 billion for welfare to insurers and mismanaged banks, but they drew the line at supporting a houseful of kids. How on earth could an unemployed woman living with her parents pay for Hollywood IVF, with all those multiple trials and implantations? The talking heads, after all, knew what IVF cost, since some of the female anchors, and the male anchors wives, likely had used it, or their friends or producers had. Who was going to pay in the future for these fourteen diaper-soiling, unsupervised, potentially handicapped babies? This during the weeks when the famous octuplets still were not being released from care at the Kaiser Permanente hospital in Bellflower, California, which was looking to Medi-Cal, the states version of Medicare, for more than $100,000 in reimbursement for the Suleman kids stay.