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    Panics and Markets

    Posted Monday, February 02, 2009 3:53 PM | By Ann Hulbert
    While we're parsing our octuplet obsession, it's worth reading Judith Warner's recent column on child-related panics in general—whether they're about teenagers and sex, or overscheduled kids, or overmedicated kids, or commodified kids. She makes the good point that such panics rarely clarify children's real situations, much less inform good decisions. Instead they tend to blur subtleties and obscure hard choices, while letting adults project their own anxieties and wallow in concern over lost innocence. (Overscheduling, for example, isn't exactly the universal childhood problem you'd think from affluent parents' alarm. Overextended adults, though, are a problem, not least because they're too frazzled to focus on the urgent problems of poor kids with too little to occupy them.)

    As for the octuplets, let's hope their arrival prompts a hard, cold examination of assisted reproductive technology rather than endless appalled voyeurism. This isn't the first fertility freak show to unfold during hard times: Remember the story of the poor Dionne quintuplets 75 years ago? Then the government—the girls were born in Canada—did step in, in the name of protecting the babies from exploitation and danger. But instead of helping, the effect was to perpetuate the circus: The girls were sequestered in Quintland, which became a national tourist attraction up there with (or even beyond) Niagara Falls. That's not part of a stimulus package we need, but here is a market that surely needs regulating.

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