I remember experiencing a vague malaise when I first heard about the McCaughy septuplets. I remember seeing videos of Bobbi McCaughy gravid, stretched, bloated, like a four-legged spider ready to fill an egg sac. I remember a vague horror as I watched the media, the nation, and the world be entranced by this freak of fecundity. Couldn't they see that it was basically wrong?
The media has been all googoo eyed over the septuplets ever since. The father has parlayed his fifteen minutes into a profitable speaking circuit. The family magazines have a guaranteed cover story as they check in on the family's development. Everyone seems to sip a warm draught of inspiration from the strength of the Bobbi and Kenny, from the solidarity of the community, and the generosity of the nation. The only thing missing from this heap of mom and apple pie is Old Glory streaming in the background. No one mentions that this great trial, this miracle was self inflicted. Bobbi and Kenny electively underwent fertility treatment that resulted in seven kids at once. It's as if someone gave themselves a lobotomy and afterwards garnered the goodwill of the world because of their courage and determination to lead a normal life.
I think many people's reaction stems from a logical fallacy. For thousands of years, humans have equated anything positive and miraculous to higher beings. Whether you believe in the Goddess, Zoroaster, or Tiny Tim, let's use "God" for the sake of argument. To most folks, birth and life are miraculous, but for the believer God must be directly involved. Now the McCaughys pop seven puppies at once. People insist that such a wondrous occurrence shows God's direct influence and special favor. Kenny, the proud father, testifies: "I knew these kids were gifts from the Lord." Seems to me like their Lord was trying to tell them something when they where having trouble breeding the old fashioned way. When their Lord said "Go forth and multiply", do you really think He intended any other than good ol' straight, missionary position boffing? Do you really think He had in mind the clinics, the examinations, the drugs?
Nope. I think the McCaughys decided to wrest the tiller away and be captains of their own reproductive fate. I think their Lord dealt them a bum hand and, instead of bearing the rather common burden of infertility with Christian equanimity, they took the chance that science offered them. I certainly don't begrudge them that. What I find distasteful is their blind hypocrisy. How can they stand there in their donated house with their donated van in the driveway, smiling with their donated orthodontics gleaming, feeding two kids through tubes in their stomachs, taking another little one for botulin injections just so he can walk, and tell me that this burden that they've visited upon themselves is the will of the Lord?
Some may say that a higher intelligence inspired scientific minds to develop the procedures used by the McCaughys. I tend to think it was more like dollar signs that inspired the medical establishment and the drug companies to mine the profit potential latent in hordes of infertile couples desperate and willing to pay heaping loads of money to have a kid. I read in the March 2001 issue of Good Housekeeping that the number of "higher order" multiple births (triplets or more) has increased 175 percent from 1989 to 1998, 470 percent from 1980. I read of the McCaughys, the Collins family and their sextuplets, and the Louis octuplets whose mother asks "Who else could do this but God?" I guess I'm just a cynical bastard.
If my wife and I ever have to bring science to bear on bearing little ones, I hope that I won't be overcome by a spiritual brain fart and have my rational faculties blasted in the event that eight ova happen to be fertilized. After all, put together a bunch of viable eggs and a mass of wigglies and you're bound to have something fairly predictable happen. If this is a miracle, then I should prostrate myself before Jehovah ("I'm warning you. If you say 'Jehovah' once more...") whenever I buy a carton of eggs and find 12 eggs inside. Why, it's a miracle!
Life is a miracle. A litter is science.
Pakeha