A ‘Miracle’ Wrought by Irresponsible Medical Acts

Now that the McCaughey septuplets are out of imminent danger, it’s possible to raise some impolite questions.

First off, what’s God got to do with it? Everyone from the parents to the doctors keeps talking about this being God’s will, as if the Almighty compelled Bobbi McCaughey to become a guinea pig for modern science.

I understand that in the popular nostrum that passes for religion, everything is God’s will, but might there not have been a suggestion from on high that the McCaughey family have but one child and let it go at that? If God had wanted them to have more children, couldn’t he have simply ordered those eggs to mature naturally instead of requiring the assistance of a drug harvested from the urine of post-menopausal European women? Just the sort of thing once condemned by some religious folk as witchcraft.

Yet the babies were still on ventilators, on the edge of life, when the news weeklies rushed out celebratory issues of what Time labeled “the miracle in Iowa.” Newsweek’s cover pulled a miracle of its own with virtual orthodontia on the smile of Mrs. McCaughey, framed by her statement, “We’re trusting in God.” No, she wasn’t. She trusted in sophisticated drugs, technological marvels and highly trained doctors to avert a potential disaster of her own making.

As the Rev. Robert Friday, a moral theologian at Catholic University, put it in a Washington Post interview, “We throw ‘miracle’ around. You had the technology that brought about that pregnancy, and you had 40 to 50 skilled professionals who saw it through. That’s human expertise, that’s not a miracle.” That’s also a whopping medical bill. Fertility drugs may be great, but should humans not take responsibility for their tampering with the natural order of things? One does not have to be a slavish devotee of Darwin to acknowledge that the survival of our species is not best served by the attempt of one woman to simultaneously mother seven offspring. There are some logical restraints of nature that one could sensibly accept. Steven Teitelbaum, a surgeon friend of mine, suggests that “a woman should have no more children at any one time than she has nipples--it makes no biological sense to attempt to have more.”

And what about the responsibility of the McCaugheys’ wanting eight children with their family’s limited income and two bedroom home? If Mrs. McCaughey had done this serially, she would have been roundly condemned by a society that now, as a matter of federal law pushed through by “pro-family” conservatives, punishes poor women for having children they can’t afford. Predictably, a spokesperson for the conservative Family Research Council hailed McCaughey’s decision to disregard medical advice and not abort any fetuses as “a wonderful example for this country,” adding that it proves “the community can come together and provide for the need of those who are faced with a crisis pregnancy and are having difficulty thinking about how they’re going to provide for their new child.” Yeah, sure. You can just see those auto company executives falling all over themselves to provide new minivans to the millions of women who have children without the means to provide for them. Free cable and a new house will be theirs for the asking, too.

Indeed, the sextuplets naturally conceived and born to a black couple in Washington D.C. six months earlier received no support. They lived in a crowded apartment off the meager earnings from the father’s two jobs. It was only after unflattering comparisons with the beneficence flowing the way of the Iowa septuplets began to make the talk-show rounds that some financial assistance came their way.

Don’t get me wrong. I like kids and want to see the McCaughey babies get the support they need. It is terrific that things have gone much better than should have been expected. But the record with large multiple births from the Dionne quintuplets of 1934 on does not bode well for the seven little McCaugheys’ psychological and medical future. When the fickle public inevitably turns away, that ever-strained couple and those kids will be left to tough it out.

For that reason, it is reckless in the extreme to celebrate what is in fact an example of medical practice out of control. The power of the pro-life conservatives has seen to it that our federally funded scientific institutions have been kept far from fertility research and the monitoring of its implications for public health.

Fertility is now a $2-billion growth industry involving 9 million women that is unregulated by sound government policy or carefully considered ethical limits. The result is that we have granted practitioners in this field the life-creating power of the gods while ignoring their wisdom.