This woman is likely to be a feeding frenzy, and I hope to heck some publicist figures out how to make money out of the story because the family is really going to need it and that would be better than a lifetime of people howling about welfare payments..
Let's see, people who can barely bring themselves to utteter the words "Welfare Reform" when talking about banking exec bonuses and the TARP / ARRP/ Stimulus Plan in Need of an Acronym that Does Not Sound Like Belching will be carrying on about her disability payments. Anyone will basic command of arithmetic will note that $168k over 6 years sounds more like state employee union with decent disability system than anything else. Of course the matter of being pregnant and not able to do rehab from the back injury is, um, an interesting wrinkle, but if John McCain can draw $50G a year for his war injuries....
People counting kids will forget that if either the mom or dad has a lot of twins in their family tree, the odds of any given pregnancy resulting in twins are much higher than the general population. I know of one family of 11 kids which include two sets of twins. I had a short stint managing data for a pregnancy population and I could certainly think to gossip over the water cooler either about whether a history of twins should be considered when doine IVF or whether someone would know if the embryos had already split pre implantation.
Water cooler conversation with the med staff would also wonder why the heck every pregnancy was due to implantation unless her back problems precluded sex and if that were the case, how did she manage all the pregnancies?
I predict the child welfare police will shortly be DNA testing all the men this woman knows to see who they can nail for child support. Possibly there could be even twistier Law and Order twists. To heck with bourgeois morality too: this woman seems just a little over the edge and she will REALLY need a support system.
I will now cease ranting or baseless speculation and resume thoughts of the 40-something couple I know who just brought two of their infant triplets home from the NICU--WITHOUT comments about every thread running through my mind on that score either.
DC
On Sat, Feb 7, 2009 at 11:11 AM, Bob Morris <bob.morris at gmail.com> wrote:
> Some have also commented on how she is obviously trying to look like
> Angelina Jolie, even to having collagen to make puffy lips.
>
> http://www.postchronicle.com/news/original/article_212206102.shtml
>
> Something really skewed is going on here.
>
> On Sat, Feb 7, 2009 at 1:43 AM, Joseph Catron <jncatron at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > "Suleman is *an unemployed graduate student, lives with her parents and
> > already had six children under the age of 8*...
> >
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