Postpartum Legal Repercussions of the Suleman Octuplets

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After the news of the birth of Nadya Suleman’s octuplets, Columbia Law School student Aileen Nielsen ’11 felt compelled to organize a panel discussion. She and board members of the Youth Justice Association invited professors of law, social work, and medicine to address how and whether reproductive technology should be regulated, and the implications the new technology might hold for child welfare law.

 

“Reproductive Law in American Society: The Recent Case of the Octuplets” took place on March 9, 2009. The interdisciplinary experts included Columbia Law School Professor Patricia J. Williams, NYU Professor of Social Work Dr. Alma Carten, and Columbia Medical School’s Dr. Kenneth Praeger, chairman of Columbia Medical Center’s Ethics Committee.

 

“Child welfare and youth justice issues have been largely left out of the debate about reproductive technologies and regulation in the past,” Nielsen said. “I think this case, unusual as it is, brings out issues that are actually present in every decision to use reproductive technology and that should be more explicitly considered in future regulation.”
 

Professor Williams recently wrote about the cultural politics of the Suleman octuplets for her column “Diary of a Mad Law Professor” in The Nation, which she used as the basis for her panel presentation.
 

“There are loads of good reasons to think about regulating these medical procedures; we should have come up with something other than a ‘free market’ for them years ago,” Williams said, and enumerated some. “The mad race for biological generation at all costs: the likelihood of multiple births, low birth weight and birth defects; the ethics of using poorer women as fetal hatcheries; the health risks to young women who have their ‘Ivy League’ eggs extracted for handsome sums of cash.”
 

“Assisted reproductive technology is a very juicy field,” Dr. Praeger said, while decrying the “denigration of what medicine is all about by some of my colleagues.” He explained the ethical obligations all physicians respect: patient autonomy, beneficence, non-malfeasance, and justice and that adhering to that code should preclude having to establish any new laws to prevent a case like the octuplets’ from happening again.
 

Praeger says the implantation of eight embryos in Suleman was “outrageous,” not “medically appropriate.” He believes that the best course for this case is for the medical profession to deal with the doctor. “There are no laws in the United States that would have prevented this, good standard practice should have,” he said, adding, “we shouldn’t have to legislate that such a scandal should never occur.”

Professor Carden asked the audience and the panel to consider the pertinent child welfare issues. “This case will precipitate changes to child welfare laws,” she said. “We will have to redefine and rethink child abuse and neglect.” Carden believes it is likely that all 14 Suleman children will be removed to foster care. She foresaw a future in which assisted reproductive technology introduces a new dimension to what is in the best interest of the child.

 

Nielsen agreed. “The idea about an expansion or reshaping in definitions of abuse and neglect was really interesting and absolutely on point,” she said. “As new situations arise, the law and other disciplines such as social work and medicine will have to reshape their conceptual frameworks to deal with new realities and learn from old mistakes.”
 

The Youth Justice Association board members Jennifer Seo, Heather Stevenson, and Mia Robertshaw had identified a number of legal issues arising from the birth of the octuplets. To what extent should we allow doctors to regulate their profession independent of government? How can we weigh the legal rights of unborn children and already existing siblings against those of parents deciding whether to use reproductive technologies? Does the community have any legal rights with respect to the individual decision about whether to use reproductive technologies? And that, Nielsen said, “is only a short list.”
 

The panel laid out the issues, and began to make some headway toward resolution of what Williams called “undeniably, sheer madness.”

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