By Joe Zajac / Staff Writer
Ponder for a moment, if you will, the level of responsibility and resources it takes to raise one child. Think back, perhaps you have experience in babysitting or have children of your own. Now, increase that number to fourteen, and consider the state of mind an individual would be possessed of to even consider it, much less go through with it.
Enter Nadya “Octomom” Suleman, who in January, gave birth to a litter of eight children. Clearly this event must be reserved for some third world dystopia, but alas, as backward as California is, it would just barely qualify as the second world.
Rather than registering as a moment of joy, the birth has only aroused the fury of a populace stricken by economic calamity, and galvanized political opportunists to demonize her for their own political gain. Suleman, at 33, is the proud single mother of fourteen children. Absent are both the father and any semblance of financial security.
Suleman lives in a tiny house with her mother and lives on a combination of money from a decade old worker’s compensation claim and disability for her two “autistic” children. Despite her squalor, she has discovered the finances to afford plastic surgery and has recently shown interest in a $1.3 million house. She has furthermore been on other public assistance programs in the past.
A peculiar situation like Suleman’s would, ideally, force a semblance of humbleness upon her but she has thus far proven ravenous for every sort of fame and publicity. Countless stories and interviews with her since the birth and she, blessed with attention, tells a perturbed public about her desperate plight, soliciting donations.
Perhaps her collagen-bloated lips could be put to better use than decrying the misery of her condition. She has made the rounds gorging herself on every manner of pop culture outlet to further her own exposure.
But Suleman has no one to blame but herself. Her abnormal pregnancy, brought on by In-vitro Fertilization, was entirely optional; she had the option of “selective termination”. But she, knowing full well the extent of her financial situation, went ahead regardless.
As of March 1, she has rejected an offer by the nonprofit group Angels in Waiting to provide free medical care for all of her children, permanent nurses and a free house because this nonprofit group nixed the idea of a reality show involving the children, citing concerns over the their health.
She has, in addition rejected a generous $1 million offer by Vivid Entertainment to finally get the attention she has so longed for…albeit by starring in her own porno. She would have done well to accept that offer, as no man, after her fame has dissipated, would pay a dime to view that ravaged mess of an orifice.
Her situation has galvanized the conservative sector into action, as she perfectly fits with the Limbaugh-ideal of welfare queen. She is a huge drain on society, an idea especially insulting considering her nigh-bankrupt state of California must pay roughly $3 million over the course of the seven month post-birth care for all eight children.
She has not earned a legitimate income for over a decade, and has forced her 67 year-old father to go back to work in Iraq to help support her. What backlash will come of this is unclear but already lawmakers in Georgia have introduced a bill restricting In-vitro Fertilization, which came with the usual fluff, like the establishment of legal rights for embryos. Way to go, Octo. She is a caricature and nothing more whose case will only sour more people on the idea of the “welfare state”.
It would be futile to find a shred of humanity in Octomom, for she has clearly sold that out long ago.