I've been noting with interest the change in coverage of the California Octoplets and their mother over the last few days. On Wednesday morning, all the morning chirp shows recruited other parents of large numbers of multiples to kvell over the still-unusual birth and muse on what's involved in doing diapers for five or more babies at the same time. Up until yesterday, the media meme on this birth was that it was a wonderful thing, a blessing, a miracle. Because everyone loves babies, right? Isn't that the weapon that the fetophile forces in this country use, even to the point of suggesting that Barack Obama's mother would have aborted him if she could have in an ad that a Catholic group actually wanted to run during the Super Bowl? After all, it's all about the BayBeez, isn't it?
Well, yes -- until the mother turns out to already have six children, be apparently unmarried, living with her parents who have already declared bankruptcy in a two- or three-bedroom house -- and as the "waf-err theen meent" topper, is apprently an Iraqi.
That sound you hear is that of wingnuts' heads exploding. For what do you do when you're a pro-fetus conservatives who thinks we should turn Iraq into a sheet of glass when presented with something like this?
As the story has evolved into the kind of case of colossally bad judgment that seems only to be the focus of media wrath when it's committed by a woman (as opposed to, oh, say, executives in the entire financial industry), isn't it funny how our fertility-worshipping culture, which gives people like Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar their own TV show, chokes on that very same baby worship when the mother is deemed to be "unworthy." And isn't it funny how the very same people who want women who DON'T want to continue their pregnancies to be forced to do so, whether they can afford to raise a child are not, are all up in arms because this woman got fertility treatments she didn't "deserve" and chose not to "selectively reduce" -- because she doesn't fit their model of a nice, white, affluent, Christian, married, madonna. If there was ever a test case of the folly of the fetus-worshippers, it's this one.
Of course the issue is one of the "W" word -- welfare -- because a family in this situation, which appears to be this woman, her parents, and now fourteen kids -- is likely to not earn enough to support this clown car full of screeching rugrats. It's an incredible stroke of luck for the beleaguered financial community. This woman is like manna from heaven for the Wall Street guys with hundred dollar bills of taxpayer money sticking out of their stuffed pockets. She's the perfect storm of focal point rage for displaced workers and others who are these days finding themselves sliding down the socioeconomic ski slope towards destitution and homelessness. What better symbol for people who don't want to think too much about the guys who have been robbing them blind for the last eight years, and continue to do so by using taxpayer money to enrich themselves and their highest-paid cronies, than someone they can brand as simultaneously a welfare slut and a terrorist? Some guys have ALL the luck.
As for me, I don't quite know what I think, other than "Is she out of her freaking mind?" Of course, I never wanted children so it's difficult for me to understand what would make someone with six kids have eight more in the attempt to have seven. My gut tells me it's none of my damn business. My head tells me that part of being pro-choice is to respect the choice to bear eight implanted embryos. And every fiber of my being says "Thank God it isn't me."
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