Psyched Out

Ah, the fresh odor of racism floats across the web in news article comments.

Nadya Suleman has a bachelor's degree in child and adolescent development and is currently earning a Master's degree. That's more education than the famous Duggers, who have 20 kids at this point, have earned.

Oh wait! They're WHITE, that totally makes it okay to have as many kids as they can get busy and make.

People are assuming that this highly educated woman is just going to give up her professional status and go on welfare, because her name is not "white" sounding. I have no idea if she is a woman of color or not, but I'm seeing a lot of racism here based on her ethnic sounding name. There are overwhelmingly more white people on welfare than "ethnic" people.

My great grandma had sixteen children who survived to adulthood (at a time with 50% child mortality before age 5), and nobody blinked an eye. Her sister had nineteen surviving children. They were both pregnant and nursing constantly from the time they married in their teens until they reached menopause. As with most contemporary women, unless they died in pregnancy or childbirth before menopause, which happened in about one in 200 pregnancies. Neither one was rich, they were farmers.

Like Ms. Suleman, my ancestors had extended families and supportive neighbors to help them rear their many children. This system works all over the world for many people facing extreme poverty, no birth control and living in conditions that they couldn't begin to imagine in their comfortable racist lives.