On Jan. 26, Nadya Suleman, 33, gave birth to eight children at a California hospital. It was a remarkable event. Giving birth to octuplets is itself exceedingly rare. To have all survive and do well, rarer still.
Yet the births raise some serious questions. Here is the information about the case which I have taken from news accounts. Ms. Suleman separated from her husband in 2000 and later divorced him. After the separation, she began suffering bouts of depression and had strong desires to have children. She began a family through in vitro fertilization and embryo transfer (IVF/ET), with one man serving as sperm donor for her children. She gave birth to 4 single children and one set of twins. Then in 2008 she went to her fertility clinic and had her remaining six frozen embryos implanted. Not only did all grow, but two of them divided so that a total of eight children was the result. Ms. Suleman, unmarried, is now the mother of 14 small children, on welfare, with her own physical disabilities, and with at least three of her first set of children suffering from handicaps.
In making judgments about all of this from the standpoint of Catholic teaching, let me begin by noting that the church does not consider the process of IVF/ET as a moral option. It is a reproductive method which separates the “unitive” purpose of marriage and the marriage act from the “procreative” purpose, i.e. the act of making a woman pregnant (through creating embryos in a laboratory and implanting them) is divorced from the act of husband and wife meeting in marital embrace to conceive a child. The two purposes are meant by God to be united, not separated out. This is the constant teaching of the church.
Not only that. In the procedure Ms. Suleman used sperm from a donor, from someone who does not want to be a caring parent for the children or to be involved in their lives. But God intended children to be the offspring of two people united in the covenant of marriage and willing to raise a child with both of their influences upon that child. That is the best scenario for a child’s development. It is true that sometimes circumstances do not allow that, e.g. if one parent dies before birth. But such occurrences are not intended.
And also, the IVF/ET method usually — although not in every case — involves loss of embryos, through the process of fertilizing several eggs (perhaps even a dozen or more), freezing them, thawing them out, implanting them, etc. It seems that there was no loss of embryos in the case of the octuplets. (To her credit, Ms. Suleman refused to abort any of the children when it was discovered she had multiple offspring and her medical advisors urged her to abort some). But the potential loss of life existed in the process from the beginning, especially in the case of gestating eight children at one time. There were also the risks of multiple health problems for the children.
Here then is a single mother, without resources, dependent upon the government for financial support, who wants to mother 14 small children, eight of them newborns. This is not responsible parenthood, as the church understands the term. It seems that the mother has personal psychic problems, although she seems to be unaware of them. In interviews which she has given, she has said that she was depressed and that she yearned to have children. Having children gave her a sense of purpose and satisfied her maternal longings. Such personal desires, strong as they may be, do not justify the begetting of 14 children to be cared for by her in her limited circumstances.
I think that one of the persons that we have to fault strongly is her doctor at the Beverly Hills Clinic where Suleman went for the reproductive procedures. It is he who allegedly implanted both the first set of children and the second set. Perhaps he could claim that he only does what patients want, but the desires of Nadya Suleman were unreasonable and he should have realized that. He could also claim perhaps that he implanted six embryos at the request of Suleman but did not expect all six to go to term. Not only did all six mature, but two of them divided to produce eight in total. As a professional, he should have been aware of such possibilities.
There is an investigation currently going on as to whether the physician followed the guidelines of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine concerning the number of embryos that ought to be implanted at one time. But the moral problems of such reproductive technologies go deeper than mere guidelines concerning the numbers of implants that should be done at one time, far deeper. And the numbers of people seeking children through the technologies is growing fast. Latest figures indicate that more than 134,000 attempts at IVF/ET are done annually (in 330 American clinics), resulting in more than 50,000 births each year.
Some new reproductive technologies have given us legitimate ways to aid infertile couples. But other technologies have produced nightmares: dramatic increases in multiple births; more than 400,000 unused, frozen embryos left over from IVF attempts (what can be done with 400,000 frozen children?); commercialization of reproduction (it is a billion-dollar a year business); surrogate motherhood (“wombs for rent”), attempts at human cloning; etc. The church in her age-old wisdom continues to teach clearly God’s plan for the human race. We ignore that teaching at great risk.
Father John A. Leies, SM, STD, is president emeritus of St. Mary’s University and was formerly head of the Theology Department there.