W hat kind of woman with six children under the age of eight has eight frozen embryos implanted and gives birth to octuplets?
To her detractors, Nadya Suleman is a dangerously child-obsessed lunatic more in need of psychiatric help than fertility treatment. For these people, Suleman and the doctors who performed her in-vitro fertilization were guilty of a profound breach of ethics.
Making it worse, Suleman has the temerity to cash in on the babies whose birth last week was greeted almost as a miracle in a country reeling from a barrage of bad economic news and mass layoffs. Reality TV shows, books, lucrative interviews and even a proposed US$2 million chat show — all have reportedly been offered to America’s newest celebrity mother.
But on Tuesday, as the din of disapproval reached a crescendo, Suleman, 33, started to give her side of the story. Her newly hired publicist made an appearance on a popular morning talk show to extol Suleman’s natural virtues.
“My client is a wonderful woman, she’s smart, she’s bright, she’s well-educated, and she has a wonderful sense of humor,” crowed PR consultant Joann Killeen. “She’s looking forward to being the best mum she can possibly be to all her children. She looks at this as a blessed event.”
Killeen acknowledged that Suleman was fielding a barrage of offers.
“There are multiple envelopes and multiple proposals, and we will sit down with our client and decide what is the best way for her to tell her story,” Killeen said. “Everyone has a different idea of what she is going to do.”
Far from being a money-grubbing publicity hound, Suleman is a well-balanced individual who just loves kids, Killeen insisted.
“She’s going to look at all the opportunities and choices that she has to provide the best financial future for her children. She’s very excited about telling her story and setting the record straight about Nadya, her family and her life,” Killeen said.
That could be a hard job given what has already been leaked out to the press. Suleman’s mother told reporters a day after the birth that Nadya was “obsessed with children” and that she had ignored her mother’s plea to seek psychological help.
It remains unclear who the father is.
On the birth certificates of both sets of children, the father is listed as David Solomon, rather than Suleman’s divorced husband Marcos Gutierrez.
Suleman has little employment history, though she was working toward a masters degree in child development until the spring of last year.
There is great mystery about how she became impregnated. Doctors at Kaiser Permanente, where she gave birth, said they first saw Suleman when she was already 23 weeks pregnant.
Many fertility specialists maintained this weekend that impregnating a young woman with so many embryos was ethically wrong, because such a large multiple-foetus pregnancy poses huge dangers both to the mother and children.
“When we see something like this in the general fertility world, it gives us the heebie-jeebies,” said Michael Tucker, a clinical embryologist in Atlanta and leading researcher on infertility treatment.
Tucker added that in his opinion, “if a medical practitioner had anything to do with it, there’s some degree of inappropriate medical therapy there.”
For now, mother and kids are still in the hospital, which has been deluged with flowers, dozens of gift baskets full of eight items for the babies, and calls offering, support, advice or outrage.
“In the first few days, we got calls like ‘How dare you do this?’ and ‘You should have your (medical) license revoked,’” a hospital spokesperson told the Los Angeles Times. “There were even those few who wished the babies would not survive.”
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist
Peter Brighton was amazed when he found the giant jackfruit. He had been watching it grow on his farm in far north Queensland, and when it came time to pick it from the tree, it was so heavy it needed two people to do the job. “I was surprised when we cut it off and felt how heavy it was,” he says. “I grabbed it and my wife cut it — couldn’t do it by myself, it took two of us.” Weighing in at 45 kilograms, it is the heaviest jackfruit that Brighton has ever grown on his tropical fruit farm, located