The Gosselins use shorter drives for one-on-one time with individual offspring. They have to plan time with each other, too. Now they can talk back to us. We have a whole bunch of talking, running-around kids with opinions so it's getting scary. That apprehension increases when she contemplates their teen years: the image of a houseful of year-olds is "too painful to think about. That doesn't mean she expects to be expecting again.
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Mobile Newsletter chat dots. Mobile Newsletter chat avatar. Mobile Newsletter chat subscribe. TV Shows. Inside 'Jon and Kate Plus 8'. See more TV show pictures. In the Beginning " ". KATE Gosselin knows a thing or two about what awaits Nadya Suleman, the controversial single mom who gave birth to octuplets last week — and later admitted to having six other children.
And Kate and husband Jon have more than enough experience with multiple births to help explain the octuplets story. Kate: Wow. That could have been us. As it is, our own news of seven at the beginning was completely shocking, and it was five more than we set out to have!
Q: Do you think Nadya did the right thing in having these octuplets, after already having six children? Kate: I believe that every life that is created has a purpose. However, personally, I would never have set out to even have a seventh child — especially if I was a single parent!
And I agree that having six or eight eggs implanted seems, shall we say, wildly excessive—and fraught with risk due to the escalating complications associated with multiples. I even wrote a column, early on in the Dad Files , about the two miscarriages my wife and I suffered. My wife and I visited a pair of fertility doctors after the miscarriages. The first one pressed us to pursue fertility treatments. Staying pregnant was.
Then we explained it again. And again. As a result, we saw a second doctor, to see if there was any help available for people like us, who were merely looking for a way to lessen the risk of further miscarriages. She told us, essentially, to relax. Go home, she said. Without the added stress of sextuplets, they would have had a fighting chance at not fighting nearly as much as they did.
The price tag for health-care reform is already higher than anybody expected, so it's probably unreasonable to think that it could include better insurance coverage for the millions of Americans who suffer from infertility.
But such coverage for women of childbearing age could lower the extraordinary health-care costs associated with the birth of triplets or more. And it would even the reproductive odds, giving middle-class and lower-income Americans access to treatment that is currently reserved for the well-off or the unusually well insured.
In the United States, an estimated one out of eight couples experiences infertility, which is defined as the inability to conceive within a year or to bring a pregnancy to term. Often seen, wrongly, as the self-inflicted punishment of working women who waited too long to have children, infertility is the result of a host of conditions -- age, yes, but also infections, hormonal imbalances, chromosomal abnormalities and physical blockage of reproductive passages.
It's nearly as common among men as among women, and possibly more common among the poor than among the rich, for the simple reason that the less money you have, the less likely you are to have had access to health care that could prevent serious consequences from relatively minor infections.
Having less money doesn't keep you from seeking infertility treatment -- it just means that the treatment you get is more likely to saddle you with high-order multiples, whose care you are least likely to be able to afford. In their best-selling book "Multiple Bles8ings," Kate describes pretty much that scenario.
She and Jon met and married in their early 20s and soon were ready to start having children. She was a nurse and Jon was cycling in and out of jobs. They were hardly affluent, and Kate, who describes herself as having been "raised in an atmosphere of financial stress," was very money-conscious.
While she doesn't detail what their health insurance covered, the couple lived in Pennsylvania, which like most states does not require insurers to cover IVF, a procedure in which egg and sperm are combined in a petri dish and the resulting embryos transferred into the uterus. When Kate failed to get pregnant naturally, she sought out a doctor who confirmed that she had polycystic ovary syndrome, a condition in which a woman usually has problems ovulating.
Kate writes that her treatment consisted of "painful injections" to stimulate her ovaries. That treatment produced twins.
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