I should write something meaningful and dramatic about the start of internship, but I guarantee those revelations will come at more inauspicious times (if ever), and what I really want to write about is the imperfect science of infertility treatment.

Last night, after doing 20 minutes of calisthenics with FitTV (we have cable at the hotel we’re staying at, and whenever I flip through channels, I have to stop on this one and do a few lunges and leg kicks because it is so mesmerizingly bizarre) I flipped over to TLC. TLC, which I have just learned, is like reality TV without obstacle courses and fish-spearing, and from what I’ve gleaned, is mostly about short families or too-populous families, or obese sons wanting to give their livers to their liver-diseased fathers. The show I was transfixed by last night was Paul and Kate Plus 8, about a couple who sought infertility treatment, gave birth to twins, sought infertility treatment again, and gave birth to sextuplets.

The TV show put a warm and fuzzy spin on the hardships this huge and loving family had to endure — from potty-training times six to keeping the house clean…everything was a gargantuan task. What the TV program chose to ignore was the fact that these parents probably had the option of not actually having to have six children at once…six children who are kind of small and kind of have some medical problems…who have the teeny faces of children who were born too early. The parents got to be featured on some Christian programming of some sort, and it dawned on me: is it a failure of fertility policies to give parents the option of selective termination during infertility treatment? Or is it a failure of science?

Now, from what I remember on my ob/gyn rotation almost two years ago, you plant a whole bunch of fertilized eggs into the woman’s uterus and see how many fetuses become viable. It is then recommended that you select one or a few to carry to term. Parents are given this option for selective termination to better enable the survival of a viable fetus — the more room a fetus has to grow, the less chances of complications. Given how many babies I saw in the NICU born really premature and really sick due to multiple gestation pregnancies, I’m not sure if fertility treatment, the way it’s done now, is working for a lot of parents who have religious objections to abortion (because in their minds “selective termination” = “abortion”…I disagree, but I also see where their line of thought is coming from).

I had no objections to this humongous and cute family. The tots were adorable, although the mom was a nag. But I can’t necessarily say they made the right choice. And I can’t even say if it should be their choice. And clearly, they thought it wasn’t their choice because they chose to leave it in God’s hands. But when we’re the ones making “life” happen in a petri dish, we’re also clearly the ones who might be able to control how well and how often that occurs, whether it be through science…or policy.