Two newspapers recently published two opinion pieces examining the ethical issues surrounding the recent birth of octuplets to a California woman, Nadya Suleman, who reportedly underwent fertility treatments. Summaries appear below.

~ Arthur Caplan, Philadelphia Inquirer: "Something has gone terribly wrong when a 33-year-old single woman -- who has no home of her own, no job and a mother who worries her daughter is 'obsessed' with having children -- winds up with 14 of them," Caplan, director of the University of Pennsylvania Center for Bioethics, writes in an opinion piece. "Examining what exactly went wrong may shed some light on what ought to be done," Caplan says, adding, "If doctors cannot prevent such shambles from recurring, then society must." Caplan reports that Suleman became pregnant with all of her 14 children through in vitro fertilization. He writes that the "most obvious questions raised by this sad saga include: How did Nadya Suleman become a fertility patient? And how did she get eight embryos implanted when she already had six young children to care for in a tiny house, with no partner and no income?" Although "[s]ome fertility doctors would answer that it's not their job to decide how many children a person can have," Caplan writes that the "idea that doctors should not set limits on who can use reproductive technology to make babies is ethically bonkers…