All Hail the Grand Multiparous Woman!

At lunch, I heard about an American woman who just recently gave birth to her seventeenth child and aims to have as many more as she can. My companions were appalled, but I applaud the woman. There are not enough grand multiparous women these days, as far as I am concerned. I’ll admit it. I just like to use the expression “grand multiparous”.

Once you hit ten kids, the impact of newcomers on the existing kids becomes vanishingly small. If you have one kid, the second kid means a 50% reduction in attention and resources available to the firstborn. A third kid costs the first two only about 33%, and the fourth costs the first three about 25%. See where I’m going with this? By the time you get to your eleventh child, the first ten barely feel it. What the hell? You might as well go for a record. An eighteenth kid might not even be noticed by its siblings, some of whom will have grown up already.

Fertility drugs would have been the way to go for this family. They have been limited in the number of children they can have by doing it the old fashioned way with mainly single births. Imagine if the woman had been pumping out litters of six at a time. She might have had 100 plus kids by now.