15 Freaky Facts About Octomom
Posted by: Jessica Wakeman
Filed in:
celebs
2:30PM, Friday November 13th 2009
Man, I think Nadya Suleman is really mentally ill. I mean, really mentally ill. I have no idea why her 14 children are still living in her house. After reading all about the Suleman kids in a forthcoming New York Times Magazine article, I feel fine saying her fetishistic breeding of children, plus plopping said children in front of video crews, constitutes child abuse. Yep, child abuse.
But she isn’t the only person we should be upset with; so many others are enabling what Octomom is doing with her kids. From the doctors who put the in-vitro eggs into Suleman to the film crew to the people who buy gossip mags about her kids—they are all contributing to this insane fetishism. The poor kids are the ones who’re suffering!
After the jump, 15 things I learned from the Times article on Octomom so you, too, can lose hope for our culture if this is what constitutes “parenting” these days.
- The Times reportedly visited while a film crew from the British division of Eyeworks, a TV company in the Netherlands, was on hand to film “Octomom: Me And My 14 Kids.” Suleman says she hates having TV cameras around. “It’s a Catch-22,” Suleman told the reporter. “I’m damned if I do what I need to do with the media to support my kids, and I’m damned if I don’t. If I don’t, I can’t take care of them…I made these choices out of the midst of being in survivor mode. I think 99 percent of people would have made the same decision.” (No, actually 99 percent of people wouldn’t have gotten impregnated with eight babies after they already had six children and then carried all eight babies to term. But that’s just my opinion.)
- Daysun Perkins, Vice President of Development for the film company making the Octomom documentary, has similarly wackadoo rationalizations for what his film crew is doing in the Suleman home. “When I started to look at the possibilities here, and spent some time with Nadya and the family, it started to feel really ... important,” Perkins told the Times. Important for whom?
- Past work by the director filming the Octomom documentary include classics such as “Half-Ton Mum,” “Half-Ton Dad,” and “Half-Ton Son.”
- A member of the film crew told the Times that when the crew first began to come to their house, the kids would stand at the windows and yell “Go away! Go away!” apparently because they thought they were paparazzi. But lately, he proudly told the reporter, the kids don’t say anything about the film crew at all.
- The crew filmed some kind of photo montage of each child on a board that’s slanted at a 70-degree angle, which involved strapping each baby on with a piece of Velcro.
- Octomom says she became impregnated with the octuplets because she had all these leftover embryos which she didn’t want her doctor to throw away. “I just decided to take the chance because I didn’t want to destroy the embryos,” she said. “That was the main focus — not like: ‘Oh, gosh! I really want eight!’ People were thinking, ‘Oh, she wanted so, so many.’ No!”
- The children’s welfare representative from the state of California, who’s supposed to keep the Suleman kids in compliance with child labor laws, thinks everything is A-OK in the house.
- Suleman doesn’t believe her plastic surgery at all resembles Angelina Jolie.
- The film crew members call the loud, snorting way Suleman chuckles her “manic depressive laugh.”
- A lot of the Suleman kids have these New Age-y parenting names, like Makai, Mayliah, Amerah and Calyssa. That’s not child abuse, but it is pretty stupid.
- Four-year-old son Aiden has autism. I’m sure he gets lots of attention for that, considering he has 13 siblings.
- Octomom received $169,000 in disability payments between 2000 and 2008 and has spent a lot of her adult life living with her parents.
- She thinks getting herself a job would be “ludicrous” and “absurd.” What, so she’s just going to exploit her kids for the rest of their lives?
- This quote from Octomom is priceless: “One of the funniest things I’ve ever heard was a Denny’s joke. It said there was a new thing on the menu, that you could get eight eggs, no sausage and the person in the next seat gets to pay the bill. I thought that was absolutely hilarious!” Ha ha.
- Actually, no, this quote from Octomom is priceless: “[The small children are] able to conceptualize that, O.K., we don’t necessarily want this. But it’s controlled.”
Still, I bet Kate Gosselin is kicking herself that she missed this PR opportunity.
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lea322
wrote on November 13 2009 @ 02:36 pm: [report]
You think Mayliah is a stupid name? Isn’t that just a variation of the president’s daughter’s name?
secretstevie
wrote on November 13 2009 @ 02:44 pm: [report]
while some of your points are very valid jessica, going after the kids names just makes your article come off as vapid. especially because there is really nothing wrong or unusual about the names.
i think this woman is totally bonkers but if i were naming the top 15 reasons why she’s bonkers, the kid’s names wouldn’t even come in to play.
Meg
wrote on November 13 2009 @ 02:45 pm: [report]
Hate her! But it really bothers me to see her doing that to her children. What’s her disability? Being perpetual pregnancy and insanity? And how were any of her implantations a good idea? I think there are a lot of people who should be held responsible for this insanity… her parents, doctors, paparrazzi, etc…
MuchoMacho
wrote on November 13 2009 @ 02:46 pm: [report]
take her kids away. drain on society. anyone who watches her show is part of the problem.
thehighandlow
wrote on November 13 2009 @ 03:19 pm: [report]
I feel nauseous.
Spitfire
wrote on November 13 2009 @ 03:56 pm: [report]
I hate invented names & invented spellings.
Octomom does have a point though about working. What kind of job could she get that would pay enough to justify the child care expense?
MuchoMacho
wrote on November 13 2009 @ 04:02 pm: [report]
she could have her children taken away from her and then work a minimum wage job in california (where i think its like $10 an hour) to support herself for starters. maybe she can earn her children back as she makes more money and lives within her means…
LadieBug
wrote on November 13 2009 @ 05:08 pm: [report]
@Meg, my sister lives in the United States (She and I are Canadian). She just had a baby and they call it disability leave. I’m not sure if it’s the same thing or not, but it’s a possiblity?
lemniskate67
wrote on November 13 2009 @ 07:00 pm: [report]
Calling the fact that one of her children has autism “freaky” and presuming that he’s not getting the attention he needs is so tasteless and lacking in class - not to mention humor, that I really don’t know what else to say.
Anniushka
wrote on November 13 2009 @ 07:00 pm: [report]
If I didn’t necessarily want the eight babies but didn’t want the embryos to get thrown out, I think I probably would have had them and then given some up for adoption. That seems reasonable, right? There’s lots of couples who really want a kid, and she’s hogging all these ones to herself. I wonder if that thought ever crossed her mind. (I bet it crosses plenty of barren couples’ minds.)
Kathls
wrote on November 13 2009 @ 08:16 pm: [report]
@lemniskate67
I don’t think there was any intention or implication that a child with autism is freaky. I think the point was that on top of having 14 small children, one of them (I think actually more than one) has special needs and probably does not receive the attention they need and deserve. I imagine that home is a bit of a circus and one person can only split themselves in so many directions, so ‘quality time and attention’ is probably at a minimum.
lashley24
wrote on November 14 2009 @ 03:23 am: [report]
How was she even able to pay for invitro? That’s a very expensive procedure and I thought you had to have fertility issues to get it done, I may be mistaken. I am very confused how some broke broad with 6 kids was able to walk into a fertility specialist’s office and ask for this and they did without hesitation. They should be charge with some kind of neglegance or malpractice. Those kids need to be taken from her, she doesn’t have the time or the staff to care for those children. @lemniskate67 I agree with Kathls, that comment was definately not offensive and there was no humor to it. The statement is true, she has a child with autism and it will be hard for him/her to get the attention they require with 13 siblings running around. Let’s not get to analytical.
Casper
wrote on November 14 2009 @ 04:34 am: [report]
There are too many kids in care already, why would you bring so many children into the world just to put them into care where they’re going to be shunted from home to home, all because you didn’t want the extra embryos to go to waste. I’d rather waste the other embryos and have the amount of kids i can handle and care for. And really it’s just plain cruel to have that many kids, pick the ones you don’t want and dump them in care, that’s not going to affect the kid at all is it.
I don’t see the problem with the names, they’re not really new age. I’ve heard a lot of them before, that’s just a ridiculous point to bump your list up.
gailo
wrote on November 14 2009 @ 05:41 am: [report]
she reminds me of a child that got bored with her old dollies and got new ones. If she loved that autistic child, she would have tried to give him the attention he deserves, not go have more kids!
She is an insult to every working mother that has had only the number of kids they felt ...THEY…not the taxpayers, could take care of.
This newspaper paying this deadbeat is also in serious jepparty of losing readers and advertizers.
writergirl
wrote on November 14 2009 @ 06:45 am: [report]
If she didn’t want the embryos to go to waste, she could have given the embryos up for adoption. Since she’s a relatively healthy woman with no known fertility problems, the eggs would have been snatched up quickly by a person/couple struggling to conceive.
She wanted those babies, not because she wanted babies, but because she—and her doctor—wanted the notoriety of being the “first” to carry and birth eight babies at once.
ootie grl
wrote on November 14 2009 @ 12:54 pm: [report]
That lady is so insane. I feel bad for her kids.