A Uterus is Not A Clown Car

Nadya Suleman, the single mother who gave birth to octuplets last week , said she wants to go back to school to get a degree in counseling. Her couseling will no doubt boil down to the usual pro-life certitudes-- breed like a bunny without regard to consequences-- either to yourself, your finances, the finances of tax payers in the state, and the lives of her children. In the meantime, if she can cash in on her story, so much the better.






Octomom




Her Begging Site


To make some sense out of this pro-life heroine, I turn to the insights of German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860). He acknowledged that love was the great mainspring of human existence: "One ought rather to be surprised that a thing [love] which plays throughout so important a part in human life has hitherto practically been disregarded by philosophers altogether, and lies before us as raw and untreated material." He anticipated the sociobiologists of the modern era by claiming that this force not only had precedence over reason but it was the apoetheosis of reason for all creatures-- to stay alive and reproduce at all costs. "The ultimate aim of all love affairs ... is more important than all other aims in man's life; and therefore it is quite worthy of the profound seriousness with which everyone pursues it. What is decided by it is nothing less than the composition of the next generation." Perhaps the problem Schopenhauer would see in Miss Suleman's bliss for procreation is that it circumvented the usual process of forming a new person, but I don't think he would be judgmental as the desire to compose that next generation stems from unconscious, unspoken yearnings. In this case, person-formation took place in a laboratory with a doctor, not in a candle-lit restaurant or a church social with a boyfriend. Just as we are unsettled by Victor Frankenstein's laboratory-created monster, so too are we unsettled by this astonishing manifestion of Wille zum Leben, the will to love, trumping prudence and common sense. But that is true with all romance. It is a temporary madness that seizes our mental processes so as to ensure "the composition of the next generation."

While the births appear to be irrational, selfish, and foolish and while it must be true that a uterus is not a clown car, I'm not sure it is right to demonize Miss Suleman, as she may not have had much choice in the matter. Her 14 children might be the inevitable consequence of the conditions that created her essence, the result of forces that neither she nor we can begin to comprehend. I am reminded of Melville's Captain Ahab. "But in this matter of the whale, be the front of thy face to me as the palm of this hand - a lipless, unfeatured blank. Ahab is for ever Ahab, man. This whole act's immutably decreed. 'Twas rehearsed by thee and me a billion years before this ocean rolled. Fool! I am the Fates' lieutenant; I act under orders." Could it be that Miss Suleman is the Fate's lieutenant and that she is acting under orders?