World class procreation

Recession or not, we still live in an age of wretched excess, and almost everyone accepts the notion that "more is better." When you combine that idea with the craving for public recognition in global competition and the biblical mandate from God to "go forth and multiply," the end results can get out of hand.

The perfect example of this, of course, is the mother who gave birth to octuplets last week. Even though Nadya Suleman, of Whittier, California, already has six children and is evidently unmarried, she managed to prevail upon some physician to provide her with the necessary embryo implantation that resulted in eight babies being born, all premature. The woman's father says he has the means to take care of the babies, but that remains to be seen. The grandmother, Angela Suleman, expressed dismay over her daughter's obsession with having more and more babies. See CNN.com, which mistakenly reported that the mother and father are married; several other news sources contradict this, such as the Chicago Tribune and momlogic.com. (Party girl Cindy Margolis is a spokesperson!)

This is precisely the sort of thing that makes a mockery of parenthood and subverts social order. Scientific advance seems to engender civilizational regression. Can the hellish nightmare of mass-produced babies raised by soulless government bureaucracies as depicted in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World be that far off?

Posted (or last updated or commented upon): 02 Feb 2009, 12: 15 AM .

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My general practice is to make no more than one blog post per day on any one category. For this reason, some blog posts may address more than one specific issue, as indicated by separate headings. If something important happens during the day after I make a blog post, I may add an updated paragraph or section to it, using the word "UPDATE" and sometimes a horizontal rule to distinguish the new material from the original material. For each successive day, blog posts are listed on the central blog page (which brings together all topics) from top to bottom in the following (reverse alphabetical) order, which may differ from the order in which the posts were originally made:

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April 4, 2008: "Andy Ashby" should be "Andy Jones"

April 3, 2010: "Mike Morgan" should be "Nyjer Morgan"

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