By giving birth to a litter of eight babies, all conceived through in-vitro fertilisation, while on welfare, and with no father to be found, Nadya Suleman unwittingly became the poster child for both free market and pro-life conservative principles.

The outrage directed at Ms. Suleman is largely the result of the ideals of the liberal welfare state: when citizens are forced to pay for the health care of their neighbour’s children, the concept of reproductive autonomy is ridiculous.   Whether or not Ms. Suleman can pay for neonatal care for eight babies is hardly her own private business when  every resident of California will be forced to chip in for the bill if she can’t.  Her ability to feed her 14 children is the concern of every taxpaying citizen of that state.  Whether women have one child, or none, or fourteen, concerns every person who will be asked to open up their wallets to pay for the “woman’s choice.”

To put it another way:

‘Love of our brothers? That’s when we learned to hate our brothers for the first time in our lives.  We began to hate them for every meal they swallowed, for every small pleasure they enjoyed…. Any time we saw a man starting to go steady with a girl, we made life miserable for him.  We broke up many engagements.  We didn’t want anyone to marry, we didn’t want any more dependents to feed.’

(Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged, pg. 612.)

Perhaps this is why Ellen Goodman said, “Everything that we don’t really want to talk about in terms of pregnancy and child rearing – marital status, money, individual choice, responsibility, and technology – had converged in the shouting and blogging over Nadya Suleman’s womb mates.”  Ms. Suleman proves the underlying truth, not only of the problems with the welfare state, but also of conservative concerns about IVF and bioethics.  Whether this comes in the form of making designer babies, or having eight children in a body designed to carry one at a time, the concerns are grounded in a reality that does not bend to political correctness.

Every person who asks how Nadya plans to raise 14 children by herself is giving witness to the problems with our brave new world of reproductive technology.  IVF does not merely help women overcome unfortunate accidents of life (as in the case of Ms. Suleman, whose Fallopian tubes are blocked) in order to be like every other human on the planet; it undermines the very limitations that every human body places upon its owner.

A woman who breastfeeds will suppress her normal ovulation cycle, which limits child-rearing in a way that is consistent with the limitations our abilities and psyches.  In all likelihood, Ms. Suleman’s body – after birthing and nursing six children prior to this pregnancy – was doing its best to regulate her reproductive capacity, but that all went out the window when she started injecting a half-dozen fertilised eggs into her womb.

Likewise, the human body – designed to have one or two children at a time – requires prospective parents to decide on a child-by-child basis whether or not they want to make more. Ms. Suleman did not choose to have a seventh child, then an eighth after finding that she could adequately care for seven; she went straight from six to fourteen. Furthermore, her replacement of a husband and father with a sperm donor only aggravates the problem: one of the many advantages of sexual reproduction is that there are two parents to raise and provide for the children, and, of course, two people who must agree on whether or not to make more babies.  IVF is not merely fixing some biological defect (like blocked Fallopian tubes); it is blindly undermining every regulation, limitation, and balance that the human body – that finely-tuned machine – places on reproduction.

The conservative opposition to welfare, food stamps, unwed motherhood, and biomedical technology is based not upon squeamishness or some fetishisation of 1950s-era norms, but upon  unalterable reality, presented to us in the stark picture of Nadya Suleman.