By Mark Greif
8 infants. A monetary crash. The porn bargains. the child formulation. How one lady grew to become a scapegoat for America's troubles--but taught us how either the amazing and the powerless are gaming our process. This comedian, provocative, wittily argued essay from n+1 means that the true which means of Octomom displays the best way all of us reside now.
Kristin Dombek is a lecturer within the Princeton Writing Department.
n+1 is of politics, literature, and tradition. factor eleven is approaching this March and may be to be had in bookstores in all places and by means of subscription. the web site is up-to-date with new, often web-only content material numerous instances every one week.
Praise for n+1:
"Just if you are pondering you are intellectually on my own on this planet, whatever like n+1 falls into your hands"—Jonathan Franzen, the recent York Observer
"A generational fight opposed to laziness and cynicism."—A. O. Scott, the hot York occasions Magazine
"I really love n+1. it really is terrific." —Stephen Metcalf, Slate
Mark Greif is a founding editor of n+1, and teaches on the New college in New York.
n+1 is a print journal of literature, politics, and tradition. dependent in Brooklyn and based in 2004, the journal has simply elevated its booklet fee to 3 occasions each year.
Read Online or Download Octomom and the Politics of Babies (Kindle Single) PDF
Best kindle short reads books
A notable and intricate portrait of a land and its humans in transition.
All through historical past, a few books have replaced the area. they've got reworked the way in which we see ourselves ? and every different. they've got encouraged debate, dissent, battle and revolution. they've got enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. they've got enriched lives ? and destroyed them. Now Penguin brings you the works of the good thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose rules shook civilization and helped make us who we're.
- 30 Minutes to Write a Marketing Plan (30 Minutes Series)
- Auto-Flow: Easy DIY Water Sprinkler System
- Rendering HTML5 Illustration
- Mastering Computer Programming
- California Mennonites
- Auto-Flow: Easy DIY Water Sprinkler System
Additional info for Octomom and the Politics of Babies (Kindle Single)
Example text
She hadn’t for a while. The Los Angeles Times reported $2,379 a month in federal public assistance and $490 in food stamps, information available in public records. Suleman played down the food stamps. As for the public assistance, it was for her disabled children, three of her first six—her children before the octuplets. It seemed that Dr. Kamrava had performed other multiple-implantation procedures for Nadya in recent years. That half her previous babies arrived with birth defects, physical or mental, was not an entirely unlikely outcome when more than one or two were gestated at a time.
I don’t know how to confirm or disconfirm this, and I’m hesitant to suggest it; so call it a personal fear, or feeling, about a discourse in which I, in my mid-30s, am increasingly a participant, with biomedical hopes on which I will likely rely as I age. If you’re a “successful” woman or man who needed but didn’t necessarily even use abortion rights in your early 20s, can you muster the same passion for their defense when you’re desperately trying to conceive at 40? [3] But eventual battlegrounds will also be insurance reimbursement for IVF benefits, or interventions of corrective medicine for “infertility,” which are not currently covered in most states; a different ethos, and a contrary though not unreasonable topic for NOW.
Or as the natural consequence of what disaster ensues, whenever the prerogatives of elites are extended to the poor. And those mutterings pointed to something more extensive and troublesome: some current ambiguity about the creation of babies, when it’s for the rich as well as for the poor. For Octomom’s “crime” was but an aspect of the new biological liberalism : a doctrine combining the political liberalism of choice—in which one has a right to seek personal identity and self-determination through reproductive medicine, indeed any medicine—and the economic neoliberalism of all goods going to whoever can pay the most to buy them, plus the encouragement of a certain competitive ethos, and secrecy of means, in obtaining them.