Pregnancy complications

It was a medical miracle when it happened.

Now it’s being criticized as a disastrous lesson in medical ethics.

The media certainly seems tickled by it. Perhaps we were a bit eager for something more cheerful after weeks of news detailing the contours of the economy in dark and dreary colors.

First there was the press conference, with the white-coat-donning, well-groomed, scrubbed physicians reporting on the remarkable health of the octet. The Kaiser Permanente logo shone as a beacon of competence.

Then there was the CBS anchor approaching the minivan parked in the quiet neighborhood with the one-story houses – “two to three bedrooms at the most,” she said forlornly – asking about the newborns’ home situation, followed by the eerie interview with the hooded family acquaintance.

At breakfast tables everywhere, eyebrows raised and coffee cups stopped mid-sip.

The murmurings began with the possibility that Nadya Suleman’s eight new babies had been conceived in vitro and that the number of embryos that had been implanted did not follow common practice and even, according to some, approached malpractice.

Talk continued and became more sour when several outlets reported in the ensuing days that the family had a considerable amount of financial stress – that they had recently declared bankruptcy and abandoned one home.

It turned out that the mother lived with her parents, and there was no way the house was big enough. “No word on the father,” reporters commented.

According to the L.A. Times, the mother already had six children. The Guardian reported the woman might have mental health issues and that she might be “addicted” to having children.

The tone of the reporting grew acrid as the details became uncomfortable.
And then there were the ethicists, the reproductive medicine community and the experts-by-satellite stating no more than two embryos should have been implanted – certainly not eight.

While the details of the pregnancy remain unclear, a series of irresponsible actions seem to be the cause. However, the context is key and – beyond dramatic details of finances – absent. The family is holed up at home, silent, and the octuplets seem to be doing well.

The abrupt and ongoing metamorphosis of the California family news story, from another emblem of medical triumph to an ethical quandary to an outrageous exhibition of irresponsibility, remains.

Distress has excavated the family’s private life from obscurity, ground it up into simplified sound bites and splattered it all over early morning news programs and newspapers.

Fertility treatments and potential multiple pregnancies present important questions regarding who uses them, and implicit in such questions are much hairier ones regarding reproductive rights and how we determine who can use them and who can’t, who can have kids and who can’t.

These are value judgments that the mainstream media haven’t handled well or with enough nuance, which has tended to couch the debate in either/or terms: She and her doctors were either irresponsible or not.

Such binary commentary frames a medical ethics debate – already notoriously complex and prone to sensational reporting – inadequately, even flippantly.