Here’s my take on the octuplet mom. It’s actually not about her as much as it is about how a woman should decide how many embryos to have implanted. Now, I don’t know the science enough to know exactly how much the probability of having one viable embryo increases when the doctor implants, say, 3 embryos instead of 2. If I did, I could do some hard numbers and actually determine the optimal number of embryos given a family’s desire for a specific number of children and their financial resources. What I do know is that the reason people give for implanting a few extra embryos is this: IVF procedures are expensive, and they don’t want to have to pay that cost again if the woman does not become pregnant.

But is it really cost-effective to add more embryos instead of possibly having to do another IVF cycle? Time reports that the cost is approximately $12,000 per cycle. Meanwhile, the average cost of raising a child to the age of 18 is about $320,000. If you ideally want one child and end up with two because you added a few extra embryos, your quest to save $12,000 by not having to have the procedure again has just cost you 26 times more money. True, there are some discount factors here (since the $320,000 is paid out over the span of 18 years), but at a decent interest rate of 5%, you’d have to put over $110,000 in the bank today to get that $320,000. (I know this isn’t a perfect analysis, but since I don’t have the data on the probability of an embryo implanted being viable, it’s not worth going through it.) So while implanting another embryo may increase the odds of having the amount of children you want, if it increases the odds of having one extra child you may not be able to afford by more than 10%, it’s not a smart thing to do.

Here’s my brilliant market solution: IVF insurance. Couples undergoing IVF treatment pay for insurance so that in the event they get too many children, they get annual payments that go towards the cost of raising the child. Insurance companies could get the information to determine the odds of having X number of children when Y embryos are implanted. But given that these couples tend to throw in extra embryos because they don’t want to pay $12,000 in another few months, I’m not sure they’d be willing to pay for the insurance.

Without IVF insurance, here is this economist’s suggestion: determine how many children you want, then determine how many children you can afford — and don’t implant more embryos than children you can afford. If you’re saying, “Duh!” you’re not alone. It seems pretty common sense to me. But judging by the case of Nadya Suleman, apparently common sense is not as common as one might hope.

P.S.  The average number of embryos transferred per cycle in 2005 was 2.4, down from 3.9 ten years before. As our science gets better, we don’t have to put all those eggs in one basket.