The Philadelphia Inquirer- May, 17, 2005

Bearing The Cost Of Childbearing

By John Grogan

When Kate Gosselin finally picks up the phone on the 10th ring, she sounds a little frazzled, and who can blame her?

From the background come the cries, shrieks and whoops of babies. Six of them, to be exact.

The Berks County woman once feared she was unable to conceive. Today, thanks to fertility drugs, she has more children than she and her husband, Jonathan, know what to do with. Those would be twin 4-year-old girls followed by the sextuplets, who turned 1 on May 10.

Gosselin’s supercharged fertility is miraculous in its own right, a testament to the wonders - and pitfalls - of modern medicine. She has rocketed into the public spotlight, however, not for her baby-making prowess but for her insistence that she cannot mother alone.

The harried mom wants help - and she wants taxpayers to pick up the tab.

Because the fragile babies were born prematurely, Medicaid paid to provide a skilled home nurse 30 hours a week. But the babies are now robust, and Medicaid pulled the plug this month on paying for the nurse the Gosselins have come to rely on as “a second mommy.”

Special circumstances

The couple, who live in Wyomissing, have appealed that ruling, and on Thursday the mother will argue that her special circumstances - eight little ones and a husband who is gone 12 hours a day for his state-government job 90 minutes away in Harrisburg - merit taxpayer help. The state continues to pay for nurse Angie Krall while the appeal is pending.

“We did not ask for sextuplets. We wanted one last baby,” Gosselin tells me, quickly adding that she loves all six beyond words. “We took the risk and we lost.”

As you might imagine, her request has not gone over well. Angry letters have popped up in newspapers across Pennsylvania. Gosselin, a registered nurse, knew the risks of taking fertility drugs. Even after delivering twins on the first go-round, she rolled the dice again. And now she wants the state to pay for her gamble?

“People are very harsh to us, and I understand that,” she says. “But until you walk exactly in my shoes and know my day-to-day life, it is very difficult to imagine…”

I want to sympathize with her. Every parent knows how demanding and exhausting even one baby can be. But the more she talks, the more I find her to be inflexible.

I agree with her that she can’t do it alone, but I ask why she needs an expensive skilled nurse instead of a basic child-care helper. Her only explanation is that she and the children have bonded with their nurse, and she’d hate to change now. She concedes the children no longer require specialized nursing care, and adds, “On Jon’s income, we couldn’t afford to pay someone even $6 an hour.”

Paying for child care?

And that leads to another question. If money is so tight, why doesn’t she return to work and enroll the children in day care? Nope. The family minivan cannot carry all eight children in one trip, and the couple can’t afford a bigger van, she says. Besides, “I would be taking my paycheck and giving it to the day care.” Welcome to the world of working parents.

She says family members live too far away or are too busy to help, and the stream of volunteers that came in the early months compromised the family’s privacy. “There is no one,” she says definitively. “I have racked my brain.”

I have one other idea for her. The couple’s house has about $100,000 of equity in it, she has estimated. Why don’t they take out a loan to pay for the nurse themselves, just as parents do to pay for tuition or orthodontics? She doesn’t want to do that, either.

She promises she wants Medicaid to pay for the nurse for only one more year, and by then the couple will be able to handle their brood on their own.

Obviously, society has a vested interest in making sure these eight children - all children - are properly nurtured. The question is whether taxpayers should be expected to take on a couple’s burden. And if so, which couples, and for how long?

There are no easy answers, only an unsettling awareness that parenting, with all its joys and challenges, belongs ultimately to parents.