A Fishbowl Of Children

You might be a little confused by my title. Let me explain, in Humanities today we read a long article about a girl lives in California. She is bankrupt, is divorced and is living in a 3 bedroom house with her mom. She had 6 children and her husband left her because he didn't want any more. So with no husband, she went to a bank and had 8 embrios put into her womb. Suprsisingly, 9 months later not only 1 baby arrived but 8 BABIES!!! So she now has 14 babies total with the 6 previous ones.

Back to what we did in Humanities; we read the article and talked to a partner about what we discovered and found interesting. We then came back together as a class we did a certain discussion called a 'fishbowl'. This is where we but 5 chairs in the middle of the classroom in a small circle and a big circle of chairs around it. In this excersize 5 people start in the middle and discuss what they think and share their oppinions. The outer circle is not allowed to talk. If they would like to talk they need to tap the shoulder of someone in the middle and take their spot in the middle. This routine continues to happen. This time we discussed if we thought that the government has the right to control how many children one woman has.

Money was brought up a lot and lots of people mentioned how she shouldn't have 14 children because she has no money and can't take care of them well. Some people even said that the government shouldn't have allowed her to have 14 children in the first place. I agree with most of this. I agree that she should have been smart enough to know not to have 14 children if she knew that she couldn't handle it. I mean, I guess that she can't actually control if she has octuplets or not but she could have aborted. I would have been happy myself after having 6 children because that is already a big responsibility. But when people said that the government shouldn't have allowed her to have so many children, I started thinking about that and came to the conclusion that the government isn't going to do a full background check on one person's financial success and they also aren't going to know every person who is going to have a child. Its not like when people are pregnant they ring up the government and tell them! Thats just not how things work so I think it was a good idea but a little impossible.

So after that explanation, I hope that you understand what I meant by my title. Technically our fishbowl was full of children in the first place but I mean it as a fishbowl with the discussion of children. Hopefully she can raise these children and plans not to have any more!