The XX Factor: What women really think.

Eight Is Great

I can’t tear myself away from the story of Nadya Suleman, who recently added octuplets to her family of six small kids, without a job, home, or spouse. She lives with her mother in a three-bedroom home, although it looks like her rent free days are soon to be over. Yet in a series of interviews with NBC’s Ann Curry, the 33-year-old Nadya sounds like she’s got it all figured out: She’s just going to finish her degree and get a job and move her 14 children into a new house. Good thing the economy is booming.

Suleman told Curry—and Nancy Gibbs at Time seems to agree—that we are judging her differently from other parents of multiples (who get showered with Pampers and phone calls from the president) merely because she isn’t married. Are they right? Noreen, you posted about free-floating squeamishness about big families, but are we even nastier when there is no dad? Suleman is not on welfare (she is collecting workers compensation) and she really does appear to adore her kids. So is she really all that different from another famous baby-collector, Angelina Jolie, to whom she bears—by the way—a freakish resemblance?