Jon & Kate Plus a Health Care Mandate

I swore I wasn’t going to blog the Jon & Kate divorce. Then I read this:

Jon and Kate Plus Health Care – Would better insurance have saved this marriage?

If the Gosselins, whose efforts to raise eight kids have been chronicled over five seasons on cable television, had enjoyed, and availed themselves of, ready access to IVF — the most sophisticated, controlled and expensive form of fertility treatment — they almost certainly would not have had six children at once. “Just one more baby,” is how Kate described their goal after twins. Without the added stress of sextuplets, they would have had a fighting chance at not fighting nearly as much as they did.

That’s a quote from Liza Mundy, the brilliant author of Everything Conceivable: How Assisted Reproduction Is Changing Men, Women and the World. Mundy is a champion for reducing higher order multiple pregnancies through the use IVF technology (instead of IUI, which is less expensive initially but more risky for multiple pregnancies). She makes sound arguments that if health insurance covered IVF, surely we could reduce the number of these dangerous pregnancies, and the number of sad implications for those families where the ending isn’t so happy (or so damned televised).

She’s right, of course. But being right, fair, or rational will not spare her or anyone from the wrath of the insensitive and uninformed internet. I’d love to take on her trolls, which she does herself with aplomb and no small amount of tact. If you really want to get pissed off, please click through that there link and steel yourself for a genuine SOMEONE IS WRONG ON THE INTERNET experience.

Otherwise, I’ll sum up the troll talking points in my favorite way – with bullets! Alas, not real ones.

1. Having a baby is a choice, not a right (no doubt uttered by anti-choice/so-called pro-lifers).
2. Fertility treatments are elective procedures, like plastic surgery, and therefore a selfish exercise in vanity (Favorite comparison: IVF to Botox injections. Fucking Botox!)
3. YOU WANT MY HARD EARNED TAX DOLLARS TO PAY FOR WHAT? (It makes no difference that we’re not talking about taxes, apparently.)
4. If your body won’t conceive, maybe it’s telling you not to have babies. (No comment.)
5. Why can’t you adopt? Don’t you know there are starving children out there who need homes? (How many adopted children do you have, asshole? Yeah, that’s what I thought.)
6. You can’t have everything you want in life and you should count your blessings. (Just a simple “fuck you” will suffice here.)
7. Fertility treatments should be “illegalized” because… (see numbers 1, 2, 3 and 4 above).

I don’t need to argue all of these points, because Mundy does it so much better, and much more level headed than I can. I will impose the moral fine on your troll asses though. For all ya’ll out there who think fertility treatments are an elective, selfish vanity procedure, I require that you surrender your ovaries or testicles before commenting on any more infertility related articles.  And, I’m putting all your children up for adoption.

How’s that feel?

Okay, now you’re allowed to comment again.

And another thing, about the poor Gosselins? They were SUCH ASSHOLES to each other, every damned episode, how did anyone not see a divorce coming? Seriously.