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.
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Dr. Caplan makes excellent points. As soon as I heard these babies were “born at 22 weeks”, it was crystal clear that the cheering, whooping media just didn’t get it.
Flea once reminded me (in a discussion related to the subject of gestational age and viability) that one’s proximity to any news story is often inversely related to the truth . . . in this case, the “downside” to megamultiples.
Perhaps the whole truth will get told one day, by those closet to this story.
We had a preemie (25 weeks). We saw so many sets of twins and triplets while were in the NICU, almost all from fertility drugs. Some ended up w/ severe lifelong complications. I’m not sure if people know or understand what they are getting into w/ fertility drugs / insemination w/ regard to preemie risks.
22 weeks!
Damn, that’s more like a spontaneous abortion than giving birth.
A local editor said it well: Women were not designed to produce litters.
I agree with what Dr. Caplan wrote. I think it’s very irresponsible for the media to talk about these births without mentioning the risks. I would love to see an article about some of the families with multiples 5 or 10 years from now and see how the babies are doing. We never seem to hear about the long term effects. Two of the McCaughey septuplets have cerebral palsy and this is glossed over in every article about them. The mother in Arizona who had sextuplets is lucky to be alive after suffering heart failure. I don’t think it’s fair to these babies in the long run because they start out at a disadvantage and don’t develop properly.
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