and best of all is now the Oct Mom now has a website built so she can get money from kind souls who want to donate to her family of 14 kids, two who are handicapable.
one of our best columnists Tim Rutten lets her have it in a piece today, which begins thusly:
These are somber and sobering times, but they may offer us the opportunity to reexamine not only the material extravagance that has characterized so much of our recent life, but also some of its emotional excesses.
Take, for example, the grotesque story of Nadya Suleman, the sad and disturbing serial mom whose apparent addiction to childbirth recently resulted in the delivery of octuplets. That brought the 33-year-old, unemployed single mother’s “family” to 14 — including a set of twins — all conceived through in vitro fertilization, all reportedly at the same Beverly Hills fertility clinic.
As one detail concerning this bizarre sequence piles on another, this strange young woman’s odd story seems to be moving out of the freak show that nowadays passes for far too much of our news and into the realm where serious — rather than merely prurient — thoughts occur.
The treatments Suleman underwent to bear her children aren’t cheap; they typically run from $8,000 to $15,000. Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that her doctor gave her the lower rate (as a volume discount), which would put her expenses, simply for conception, at $48,000. Suleman told a television interviewer that she covered those costs out of a $165,000 disability settlement she obtained after suffering a back injury working at a state mental hospital.
She also said she is not “on welfare,” which is a bit of a semantic dodge, because it turns out she’s receiving both food stamps and Social Security payments for two of her children who suffer from unspecified disabilities. She also told the interviewer she plans to “support” her family with federally guaranteed student loans while she pursues a master’s in counseling. (One tries to imagine receiving therapy from this woman, but the mind refuses to form the requisite image.)
needless to say, the octobabies, chris brown, the slow bentley car chase, and numerous murders have set our LA Now blog on fire and im sure its helping other local blogs like LAist too. thanks octomom!