It is often positive and one-sided, and often fails to show very serious consequences:

But the media owe us more than just cheering, gushing and cooing when reproductive technologies create babies in numbers that do not occur naturally and, more seriously, that carry tremendous risks.

In the case of the Masches, the mother went into life-threatening heart failure right after the births. Too much blood was in her body from supporting all the fetuses and she nearly died. News reports noted this problem but passed over it to get back to the positive side of megamultiples. The Minnesota babies were born extremely premature at 22 weeks. Sadly, three have already died.

But the downside of megamultiples, in terms of risk to the fetuses or the moms, got little media play in the initial stories about the two sets of sextuplets.