Thursday, February 19, 2009

Octuplets after 6 previous- a social value question

Octuplets' family facing foreclosure threat


The default notice shows Angela Suleman is $23,225 behind in her mortgage payments and that the house could be sold at auction beginning May 5.

However, the mother of 14 may have more time to help with the repayments after the bank official said the sale could still be delayed by the discretion of her lender, IndyMac Federal Bank of Pasadena.

"We take these things one case at a time — there's no shortage of people struggling to make their mortgage payments right now," an Indymac representative said.

"Roughly more than 10 percent of our customers are 60 or more days behind.


Not that this is a big surprise.

But it links to this article

Incidentally, the octuplets’ father is also the father of Suleman’s six other children, who were also conceived via in vitro fertilization.

According to Suleman’s mother, Angela, the octuplets’ father, is one of her daughter’s “admirers.”

Reportedly, the name David Solomon appears on four of the first six kids’ birth certificates. Earlier this week, the Associated Press reported that the octuplets last names would be Solomon. But, no one knows for sure if David Solomon is actually the name of the hopefully-not-so-proud father.

Whomever donated the sperm that resulted in Suleman giving birth to a total of 14 children likely feels he bears no responsibility for the chaos these children will experience in life. After all, once he provided his sperm to doctors, they were the ones who presumed Suleman to be a competent person and used that sperm to fertilize her eggs. They acceded to her wishes to implant the resulting embryos in her uterus. They tended to her during the pregnancy and delivered the children into the world.

What possible moral failing could be assigned to a man who merely provided the genetic material for a sterile laboratory procedure sanctioned by the law of our land, a procedure that has helped bring millions of beloved children into the arms of good and decent parents?

I believe the octuplets’ father does bear a moral burden for providing the sperm used in this birthing calamity. The 14 children fathered by Suleman’s sperm donor were born to an unemployed mother with psychological problems and no apparent insight into the consequences of her actions. But they are also the offspring of someone she apparently knows, and that person apparently has even less concern for the human lives he helped create.



The Suleman case exposes gnawing ethical questions that are not asked frequently enough about the whole process of sperm and egg donation.

At what ethical cost does a society decide to sever every meaningful connection between millions of human beings and their offspring? When the medical system is shown to be capable of the kind of reprehensible, misdirected creative impulse evident in the Suleman case, doesn’t it begin to support the notion that donors of sperm and eggs have some responsibility to make sure they aren’t helping to create chaos and suffering? Must asexual reproduction be, by its very nature, amoral reproduction?


I say we do a DNA test and if the children are his then hold him financially responsible. In any other case many states would do that automatically.
I doubt that anyone who knows this woman doesn't hear the off key calliope music every time she enters the room.

Invitro fertilization is a very expensive process. Where did the money come from for that?

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