Frothy Paradise

…the recent spate of shows featuring parents who, for reasons obscure to me, decided to have preposterous numbers of children (e.g., Jon and Kate Plus 8, 17 Kids and Counting, and the new one with a title that slips my mind at the moment but is something like “HEY, WE’VE GOT 12!! WE HAVE *12 KIDS*!!! CAN YOU BELIEVE IT?” Ok, I exaggerate, but not by much)?

Maybe I’ve missed something here, but what’s admirable about people who breed litters? And could someone also help me out in squaring the admiration for the TV families with the heaps of disapprobation visited upon Nadya Suleman, the so-called Octomom? I mean, no one refers to the aforementioned Kate as the Octomom, even though she apparently also had eight children (yes, I’m aware that she didn’t have hers all at once, but it’s still odd that people seemed to want Nadya Suleman hanged, drawn, and quartered at the same time they shriek with delight about how precious the the 17 Kids and Counting parents are). I’m genuinely puzzled here, on a couple of levels.

And let me cut one argument off at the pass, before anyone even gets into it: please don’t give me a lecture about how “choice cuts both ways” or “Her body, her choice!” or any of the other crypto-abortion straw man arguments I’ve been reading when people talk about this stuff. The abortion debate has to do with whether it’s acceptable for a society to force women to bear children; it has nothing to do with the moral, social, and political questions involved in deciding to have huge families. I’m talking about the latter here, not the former.