ABSTRACT
In addition to the accounts of scientific discoveries and medical innovations, personal medical stories are routinely covered in the media. Sometimes these individual accounts are transformed into medical morality tales of questionable judgments and physician irresponsibility. In a previous edition of this book, I mentioned the 1997 report of a Midwestern woman who gave birth to septuplets after using fertility drugs to produce the pregnancy and declining the opportunity to “selectively reduce” the number of embryos that resulted. In a déjà vu moment, headlines on January 26, 2009, announced another multiple birth, this time involving eight infants born nine weeks prematurely to Nadya Suleman of Bellflower, California. Ms. Suleman had used sperm donation and in vitro fertilization; as in the earlier case, she declined the opportunity to reduce the number of embryos that resulted. The initial story, reported as a feel-good segment on the evening news, quickly became a highly critical account when it was revealed that Ms. Suleman already had six children at home, that she was single, that implanting that many fertilized eggs violates accepted in vitro fertilization (IVF) standards, and that the costs of short-and long-term care for the octuplets would likely become a public expense.
