While Nadya Suleman was crucified for her delivery of the octuplets, Jon and Kate Gosselin left to defend each intrauterine insemination, and the Duggars depicted as fertility-meets-faith fanatics, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie have largely seemed to escape poor procreation press. In fact, reports announcing, “Brad & Angelina: Trying for a Baby” and “Brad and Angelina Trying for Baby #7!”—often lovingly supplemented with a romantic picture of the duo—seem to leave readers in anticipatory baby bliss, just waiting on their doorstep for the celebrities’ stork. And this reporter can’t figure out why. Sure, they have the money and the means, beauty and careers, live in a house that could shelter a mid-size army, and are de-orphaning children from Cambodia to Vietnam, but aren’t most of the issues still the same? Aren’t there only two parents (minus babysitters) for six children? Twenty four hours in a day? A child’s quality of life to consider?
Reported Us magazine in its recent September 21, 2009 issue, “Two insiders tell Hot Stuff the couples are so strong that Jolie is actively trying to get pregnant. . . . Jolie is taking prenatal vitamins, says a source.” But my personal favorite is when Us magazine queries in its issue: “And how could the A-listers resist adding to their brood when they see how the six little Jolie-Pitts are also enjoying their time in France?” Umm . . . the Octomom? Jon and Kate Gosselin? Sanity? Children enjoy lollipops, should we give them forty? Tots fancy Fritos, should we pour bags down their little throats? Sometimes more is more than just more: it’s mad.
The fact is, let’s pretend for a moment that you have six kids and aren’t on every tabloid leaning on a newsstand, that you aren’t the Goodwill Ambassador for the UN Refugee Agency, that you don’t own production company Plan B Entertainment, that you aren’t in the midst of shooting Blockbusters or on press tours . . . and that your children sleep eight hours a night. If you use every moment left in the day, this leaves each of your six children 2 hrs. and 40 min. each of your parental attention per day. Quality.
Rich or poor, married or divorced, managing or crumbling, adopted or biological, with the Duggars, Jon and Kate Gosselin, Octomom Nadya Suleman, and Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie: When did we start to breed like rabbits? Are American adults so “enjoying” parenthood that they proliferate? Are we thinking of the children—or are we acting like them?—when we take to the sheets, enter labs, skim sperm banks, or adopt, to create broods bigger that would leave even Mrs. Brady wringing her hands? In short, when did procreation become recreation?
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