Selling Babies: A Profitable Industry in Any Economy

Parents of the World, Please Stop Exploiting Your Children

When identical quintuplets were born to a poor, French-speaking family in rural Ontario, the government smelled a hit. TV wasn’t around back then, but they did have zoos, and one was constructed especially for the girls who, dressed identically with perfectly curled hair, would play in front of audiences, surrounded by a cage. Six thousands visitors arrived each day.

The parents did not agree to this - the quintuplets were taken from them when they were only four months old, their exploitation a work of the Ontario government in the name of the tourist industry, all but lost to the Great Depression. The Dionne Quintuplet museum remains today, in place of the original nursery, and if you’re ever in Ontario, you can look at the barbed wire fence and sigh…the methods back then were so old school.

Today, we understand that camera crews make the process less invasive, and cable shows attract far more audiences than any single tourist site. And parents will sign up for all of it, given the right incentives, or so I’ve heard. This is the tale of Octomom, of Britney Spears, of Brook Shields, and the tale of the Gosselin sextuplets.

And here I must admit…I was a fan of Jon and Kate Plus 8.

Jon and Kate Gosselin, if you haven’t heard, had twins and then sextuplets, and then a show on TLC. The show started small, but their kids were damn adorable, and the audience grew until the show became one of the most popular on the network. Tabloid fervor ensued.

Today, we are all in the eye of a very public shit-storm.

(In case you’ve missed out: Jon is living above the garage and sneaking out at night to visit his new girlfriend, who is a young teacher. Kate apparently agreed to this as long as they keep on filming, and wants another two seasons and may be willing to enter marriage counseling to make this happen (though she‘d prefer not to). Also, she may or may not have been sleeping with her bodyguard while doing a talk-show tour while Jon was home with the kids, have fired over 40 nannies from a local agency, and generally been caught up in this golden cash calf of her own creation. But I feel for Kate, because most of this tabloid news is coming from her own parents, brother, and sister-in-law, which is simply horrendous. Now you know.)

As the marriage implodes, I inevitably feel responsible. I feel responsible for a lot of things that have nothing to do with me, but in this case, I feel like viewers everywhere were integrally complicit. We loved the kids. We loved the marriage. We bought every line, and every line of merchandise, and we turned something small and maybe-okay into something enormous and rancid with a life of its own, raking in $25,000 to $75,000 an episode, invading privacy, destroying homes.

We turned our little moppets into child stars, and inevitable casualties. I can’t imagine a future for the kids I’ve grown to love without one of them dying of an overdose in a bathroom stall, and another entering rehab at thirteen. (Please not little Alexis, or Mady…or Leah. Oh, or Colin, or sweet little Hannah. I guess…you can have Joel, little sweet baby Joel…My god, I’m a monster.)

And so, to the Gosselins, I’m sorry. I got caught up in your little feet, and your tiny smiles, and it wasn’t okay. I hope that, very soon, the world will start to right itself, and I’ll do my part. I won’t be watching.