The Arrival of the Second Octopeeps

Several months ago, from the body of a single hapless yet seemingly intelligent and well-spoken young woman, a huge team of medical workers pulled no less than eight infants in one day, and as far as I know, all eight are still alive. It was the second such never-before multiple birth on record, at least in the U.S.

Though this woman would vigorously insist that she did, it's almost impossible to see how she or anyone could say that she "gave birth to" these octopeeps, because actually she didn't, in the ordinary sense of that term, and that started even before the time of conception.

In addition to the woman herself, the main culprit in this extreme stretching of the human reproductive process was modern science and medicine. Copulation as we all know it, followed by the full term of carrying and climaxed by a normal birth, whether in a taxicab or a quiet hospital operating room, could not have pulled this off. Instead she had to hand to the fertility doctors some sperm in a bottle from a donor of her choice, and that and other special procedures had to be followed in the same vein right up to the moment of emergence, while other out-of-the- ordinary procedures figure to stay in the picture far into the future, with her playing a spectacularly detached role, especially given all the amazing stuff that has come out about her and from her.

--Such as that she has no husband to help her with all this, and that she's not gainfully employed, and that she already had six (6 -- count them!) other children that not she but her badly put-upon mother had been taking care of in modest circumstances, and that, though this woman knows that she herself can't begin to take care of all 14 of her progeny properly, she plans to be able to soon -- that is, as soon as she completes a couple of years in college so as to get some kind of degree that will enable her to obtain the required earnings.

This woman has been roundly attacked by a wide variety of people, to the extent that I haven't heard much about the enormous outside help on which she is obviously banking, though so far all her octopeeps are still in Kaiser Permanente or wherever and will not be released to her till she shows sufficiently more in the way or resources and -- I would think -- responsibility, and I don't see how that can come any time soon, or ever, despite her "good looks." Responsibility trumps physical appearance every time, especially when you're talking about fourteen (count 'em --14!) small kids. That enormous number, all obtained in little more than two shots, is a LOT of tots for even a team of fully responsible women. Yet that must be the real thing in her mind, as shown by her use of the statement made famous long ago by H. Clinton, about "it takes a village to raise a child." But there's a big difference in what Ms Clinton was talking about.

In all the criticism of this act, you mainly hear only one question asked, and that is, where will this woman (at one time I had her name memorized but now I've already forgotten) get the necessary wherewithal? And I guess that at this moment even the octopeeps would agree that that's really the only question worth asking.

Yet I still think that actually there is a much bigger one, and that's what this says about the curse that is quickly undermining everything that not only people but also most other living things on the planet, excluding critters like bacteria, are trying to do, and that is human overpopulation.

In her defence people will say that the birth of the octopeeps is just an extremely rare, zoological curiosity and nothing more, and that even the growing frequency of multiple births is no crime, because also a far larger number of other people are limiting themeselves to just one child or none at all, and anyway, the Earth still has a huge number of largely unpopulated areas in which many more people could still live comfortably, and you should see especially how the populations of sizable countries have been projected fitting inside just the state of Texas, though we can easily guess how unhappy everybody would be with that idea, especially the Texans.

Nevertheless for a long time I have been certain that before long the crowded conditions in the cities and elsewhere, coupled with declining resources, will result in people needing to get licenses before they can have children. And while they are bitterly bowing to that, rather then envying they will curse their forerunners for failure to be more circumspect in blessing the world with ever more of their kind.

And in that light, producing eight children all in one go without even an ecstasy fling in the back seat of a car would be enough to produce a real epidemic of sprained necks in the future, caused by uncontrollably shaking heads, more than has already happened, at the hands of this woman who was once world-famous but who has already started to recede far into the background, in the face of economic hard times all over.