The Ethics of Being a Single Mom

So I was reading the Yahoo!news earlier tonight when I came across this article featuring a woman who had just had a set of octuplets and already has six other children.  The mother’s mother is, of course, concerned that her daughter is “obsessed with having children” and has been since she was a teenager.  The mother also says that

“It can’t go on any longer . . . [s]he’ got six children and no husband.  I was brought up in the traditional way.  I firmly believe in marriage.  But she just didn’t want to get married.”

The article also includes some dubious psychiatric advice from doctors who have never met either the woman having the children or her mother.  The article further divulges the father’s name of some of the older children which the author of the article aquired through the Associated Press who reviewed those children’s birth certificates.

Apparently, this woman’s pregnancies have “sparked an ethical debate” about whether or not this woman should have been allowed/encouraged to continue having in vitro fertilization after she already had 6 children.  However, I think the more clear ethical issues in this case surround the behavior of the grandmother and of the press.

With regard to the grandmother’s comment, would her daughter’s situation really be that much better if she were married?  If she had a husband, would it all of sudden be a piece of cake to raise 14 children including one set of octuplets?  It seems that the reason this woman has caused such a stir is not because she has 14 children but because of the way in which she had them.  She’s not married and she chose to have a family the way that she wanted to have a family.  Isn’t that her right as a citizen and as a woman?  Regardless of whether her decision was the best thing for her or for her children, it was still her decision to make and not anyone else’s. 

It’s also a little wierd, I think, that the media has taken such an interest in this story.  So what if she had a set of octuplets?  Yeah, it’s a lot of babies, but why is it so terrible that she keeps having babies and she’s a potential burden on the state but not the Duggars or the Goesslins or any other family with large numbers of children (espeicially multiples)?  The whole tone of the article seemed like it was trying to restrict this woman’s choice about the size of her family, but I always thought that the ability to choose to limit the number of children a woman had also meant her ability to choose not to limit that number.  Thoughts?