The mother of those octuplets talks to the media.
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLtm_DW2jMQ]
[h/t Maclean’s]
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Rebecca adds: It’s surreal. Where to start?
One tiny detail of the story: there is a daycare at the university that she hopes to use while finishing her Masters in counselling. There is a very well regarded daycare that a lot of my friends have used at a nearby community centre: for the four infant spaces (infant being between 12 week and 18 months) they have a waiting list of 150 babies. And she’s under the impression that she’ll be able to find, never mind pay for, fourteen spaces?
“I wanted to be a mother” – yes, of course, what could be more natural than to want to be a mother, and since (it’s implied) her fertility problems are linked to an injury, how much worse to feel that your ability to become a mother has been violently taken away from you? But at what point do we have to move beyond the wants of individual adults, and think about the babies?
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Patricia says: The throwaway question “you knew you weren’t going to selectively reduce?” was a nice touch, I thought. It provides a chilling insight into the world of assisted reproduction. As the mother goes through her story, the interviewer just wants to make sure she’s got the process right: the mother had implanted multiple embryos and she didn’t plan on killing even a few of them. Without batting an eye, the mother acknowledges that the “selective reduction”/killing step was not part of her plan and continues on with her story. Implicit in the whole exchange is a complete acceptance that that step would be a completely normal response to the possibility of such a multiple birth, but it just didn’t work for this mother.
I wonder how they decide which babies to “selectively reduce”? Does the doctor review that decision with the parents?
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