By Jessie Fillingim

Try and maintain composure. Take a deep breath. I’m going to talk about Nadya Suleman, “Octomom.” Yes, the single mother of octuplets and six other children under the age of eight. Stay calm. She’s not on welfare yet.

I know, I know. Allowing a doctor to implant her with six embryos when the American Society for Reproductive Medicine would have recommended two probably wasn’t the smartest choice, especially when she isn’t employed, or that the chance of at least one of the octuplets having a life-long learning or developmental disorder is pretty much 100 percent.

And I know you don’t even want me to get you started about the doctor who performed the in-vitro fertilization, who some have said violated his ethical duty as a physician. But get ready, because I’m about to go there.

Proposed legislation in states like California, Georgia, and Missouri threatens reproductive rights by demanding more government oversight on fertility clinics. Surely if a woman has the right to terminate a pregnancy, she has the right to create one. Even eight. We don’t take the right to have an abortion away because one girl made the stupid choice of trusting her boyfriend to wear a condom. So it doesn’t make sense to punish all the women who may require drastic fertility treatments to conceive just because we think one woman made a stupid choice.

What would you have had the doctor do instead? Six eggs were fertilized, which means six little zygotes. For those of you who believe life begins at conception, wouldn’t it be murder to flush half the tube down the sink? Maybe Octomom is pro-life. Shouldn’t Nadya Suleman have the right to be implanted with as many of her own fertilized eggs as she pleases? Her doctor followed her wishes instead of sticking to recommended requirements that would have required him to abandon some of the eggs.

Whether or not a doctor can show discretion in refusing a patient’s wishes is a tricky and sometimes conflicting issue in our law. Most states, including Georgia, have controversial “conscience clauses” that allow pharmacists to refuse to fill prescriptions for Plan B (the morning-after pill) if they have moral objections to prescribing medicine that will abort a fertilized egg. Georgia doesn’t want to force pharmacists to have to go against their conscience by being required to prescribe zygote-killing emergency contraception, but the state has widespread support for legislation that would force a fertility doctor to do just that.

Even without such a law, how much discretion should a doctor use when deciding how many embryos to implant a woman with? Doctors may not be the best people to evaluate whether a particular family is deserving of children. Octomom’s doctor should not be expected to ask every prospective parent about her finances. At what point does turning away poor patients become classism? And I, for one, would be outraged to hear a doctor was turning away mothers based on relationship status, no matter how many kids she had already.

Sure, it sucks that we as taxpayers may have to pick up the tab for Nadya Suleman and her 14 children. But that’s America. What’s eight kids when compared to the over two million people in United States prisons that we are funding through our tax dollars?

You have good intentions, I know. You are just concerned for the welfare of her children. Luckily, there are laws against child neglect. If she cannot take care of them, they will be taken by the state. But then we really have to pick up the tab. Children in foster care are more likely to have chronic conditions, be unemployed and end up in prison. Wait a minute, this is starting to sound like a taxpayer-dollar-sucking cycle!

Even worse, a foster care child is four times more likely to be sexually abused than a child in the general population. Nadya Suleman is starting to sound like a pretty good mother in comparison to the foster care system, huh? If we really do care about these kids, let’s reform foster care instead of rushing to quick and easy prohibitions that would take away reproductive rights.

Jessie Fillingim is a second-year law student. You may e-mail her at [email protected].