Octomom Nadya Suleman: A Case of Reinforcing Bad Behavior

Some time ago, David blogged about Nadya Suleman:

I suppose after delivering fourteen children, posing for Christie Hefner is out of the question.   Suleman is going  have busy changing nappies and will be hard pressed to pay for a dipper service after her fifteen minutes of fame expire, in fourteen and a half minutes.

Well, look who shows up in my scan of the news this morning,  by way of The NY Daily News and why…

Brace yourselves: Octomom Nadya Suleman, who already has 14 children including a set of infant octuplets, told ABC’s “Good Morning America” she may have more kids.

“If I wanted to do it the traditional way and get married, that’s like another chapter,” she said, although the 34-year-old mom laughed at the idea of having more kids right now.

Octomom’s most recent project is a documentary series, in which she let a camera crew follow her around while she cared for her 14 children. The first television special has already aired in the United Kingdom.

Well, maybe. I mean there’s always osmeone who will be crazy enough to get involved with this woman. As David says:

In a better world, women think about who will support their children before they concieve then, not after.    A husband would come in nice but what man wants an instant familyof fourteen children with mentally deranged mother?

What we have here, people, is a mental illness being supported as a “lifestyle”, and the results of that support.

Octomom says she spends $1000 in food per week, 4.5 gallons of milk a day, and $10,000 for five nannies for $10,000 a month, in addition to other expenses.

She made perhaps a quarter million for that recent project for British TV. Apparently she plans to do the same thing for American TV, and is shopping the project around as you read this. I find fascinating that so called “reality television” should end up focusing on the absolutely surreal.

I agree, certainly, that the payment for the excessive offspring is severe.  She’s got herself a problem.  The thing is, it’s a self made problem.  At least, insofar as she’s the one who went in for the procedure fourteen times. And I wonder how much of the cost of those procedures was also supported by taxpayer funding.

Look,  I’m certainly not going to encourage the government to become involved in limiting the number of children per couple, or for that matter, per individual.   That way for example, lies China and it’s strict two child policy. If you can pay for the kids, fine.  Yet,  not paying for such children out of governmental largess seems to be a natural limit on such excess that has been removed by political correctness.  . The funny thing is, that we don’t even consider that option , because we are told paying for those children out of governmental largess is the humane thing to do. it’s just conservative meanies who consider the matter any other way.  Or, so we’re told.

Perhaps the biggest part of all of this, (and I note with irony the one part of the story that’s being missed)  is the vanishingly small chance that any of these children are going to come out of all of this with anything even remotely  resembling a normal life.   Funny how the “child welfare” people so interested in paying for tehse kids, never bothered to raise that question very loudly.