No-No Nadya

Newsflash #1:  Man beheads his wife when he finds out she wants a divorce.
Newsflash #2:  Man kidnaps woman and puts her in a diaper and reads her passages from the Bible.  Sometimes he tries to smother her with a blanket or pillow.
Newsflash #3:  Woman who already has six kids has octoplets out of wedlock.

Whole world outraged--by newsflash three.  Nadya Suleman, the octuplets' mother, hired a public relations agency to deal with the crush of media attention, but the PR firm quit when they started receiving death threats.  Even Suleman's own father has attacked her in the media. 

<!--{12352578321930}--> Conventional wisdom holds that this woman having 14 children is irresponsible—in fact, downright disgusting.  "The taxpayers" will end up caring for these children—because any women who would have so many children without a husband must be incapable of caring for them. 

A comment by "eddie" on a Village Voice blog summed up public opinion:

"You are a disgrace. Give these children up for adoption. You are not equipped to care for them - emotionally, physically, financially, etc. You are being very selfish."
 
Another poster, jjsurly, after calling Suleman a b****h and a c**t, expressed a wish that the newborns would all die and "end that f***ing gene pool."  See these and other explosions of vitriol, as well as several instances of armchair psychology, at:

http://blogs.villagevoice.com/dailymusto/archives/2009/02/is_the_octuplet.php

When are you selfish for wanting your own children?  When you're a single woman.  If the "pregnant man" had had octuplets, would anyone have been so cruel?  Suleman is also universally branded "mentally ill" even though she has no diagnoses of actual mental disorders whatsoever, just the sorts of temporary problems that the majority of the population suffers from, such as paranoid tendencies, PSTD, and depression—ALL related to her very high-risk, medically assisted pregnancies.  Suleman is labelled crazy because the public thinks she's crazy for what she's done, and what she's done is none of the public's damn business in the first place, except as pure scientific fact.

The virulent public outrage and obsession surrounding this woman, which approaches that following the Virginia Tech shootings, is not just because Nadya Suleman is neither a man (even recently) nor married to a man.  If Paris Hilton's dog had puppies, they would be assigned more intrinsic value than what the media has given to these little human souls.  "Who is going to feed them?" newscasters snort with derision.  "Taxpayers," they answer themselves. But no one begrudges General Motors their billions.  Nobody begrudges Goldman Saks theirs.  It's supposedly a necessity, for all of us, that giant corporations run into the ground by incompetent men survive, propped up by taxpayer money.  The Suleman babies are disposable.  The woman who had them isn't even pretty, she couldn't afford a good plastic surgeon and therefore ended up less pretty, she's not Caucasian (half Ukranian, half Iraqi), she receives public assistance, she isn't that smart, and she doesn't have wealth or celebrity (at least not the kind when the media loves you).  Her new media moniker is Octo-Mom, or sometimes Ock Mom, which makes her sound like something that would chase Spiderman up a building.

Suleman also refused to reduce the number of the embryos via abortion, a totally private decision which many advocates of a woman's "right to privacy" have publically denounced.  She gauchely made a public statement that "God will provide," which isn't exactly a cutting-edge 21st century belief and places Suleman squarely, if anybody had any prior doubts, in the evangelical lower-middle class. 

When psychotic men like those in newsflashes #1 and #2 get locked up, assuming they don't get off with a light sentence or no sentence, who pays for the men?  We all do.  For the cost of incarcerating two men, any reasonably frugal person could easily raise 14 kids.

So poor Nadya Suleman is doing what she must to do in order to survive:  she's bathing in the limelight of hatred, inviting it, flirting with it.  The two things she cannot possibly get are privacy and respect.  So she makes up to the oppressor; she prostitutes herself to a vicious wolfpack of a media who will continue to tear her apart.  She has made on-air excuses for herself, saying she had a "dysfunctional childhood" that made her want a big family, as if her motives in having babies are anybody's business but her own. 

The sheer physical accomplishment of what Suleman has done is staggering.  We admire a man who climbs Mt. Kilamanjaro, but not a woman who gives birth to eight healthy children at a time?  Which of us qualifies to add to the gene pool, and who is going to decide?  As long as woman resides with a man, no one even asks whether she has the right to give birth, or whether she has a right to get food stamps.  No married woman will ever appear on the TODAY show with a banner across her chest that says, "TODAY EXCLUSIVE:  How Will Octuplets' Mother Pay for Family?"

In a country in which we waste millions of metric tons of food—spoiling when unsold in supermarkets, rotting ungleaned in the fields—are any of the squalling pundits and bloggers really worried about feeding these babies?  Or is this a medieval attitude toward a woman whose sexuality has gotten out of line, and all the rhetoric about who'll-care-for-the-babies is just an excuse to paint a scarlet SF for Single and Fecund on Suleman's chest?  The difference between the archvillain Octo-Mom and John and Kate Plus 8, who got deluged with free diapers, vehicles, and trips overseas and were given their own reality show, can be summed up in one word:  John.  Where's your John, Nadya?  How dare you?

A man who killed all of his children would not be universally despised and set off an international media frenzy, because we're accustomed to men killing children.  We're also accustomed to giving them free lawyers and free meals.  What a crime Nadya has committed: to give too much life, and maybe cost her fellow citizens a fraction of what they'll pay to try to rehabilitate a man who deals in death.

A California charity, Angels in Waiting, has volunteered to help with the children and give them caretakers other than their mother.  As a fellow American and fellow citizen of Earth, I hope Nadya Suleman will be left in peace to care for her own children, I pray that being exposed to hundreds of millions of other people will cause her to encounter at least a few kind ones, and I volunteer to help her feed any or all of the babies if they're ever in danger of going hungry.

The octuplets, incidentally, have names.  Their names are:  Noah, Maliah, Isaiah, Nariah, McCai, Josiah, Jonah and Jeremiah.

Children are precious.  Period.

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See also Susan Reimer's article for the Baltimore Sun:

http://www.baltimoresun.com/features/bal-te.reimer23feb23,0,7036465.column