KATE GOSSELIN: HOW SHE FOOLED THE WORLD - THE RISE AND FALL OF A REALITY TV QUEEN (6 page)

Her first cycle was a failure. At least that’s what she claimed. Actually, she didn’t try and fail with the first cycle. She lied about the first cycle to make the story of her not being able to get pregnant more believable.

The second cycle, according to Kate, was a “great cycle.” When Kate went to see the infertility doctor for her scheduled ultrasound, she was told that it was a great cycle with three or four mature follicles. That would be an expected result for a healthy woman taking the controlled injections of HCG, and it would be a great cycle for someone with PCOS taking controlled injections of HCG. The doctor had no reason to be suspicious at this point.

Kate des
cribed that doctor’s visit by saying that the doctor was thrilled that he had discovered three mature follicles and maybe even a fourth with the potential to still mature.

Then, to make herself look special while also covering the lie, Kate
said that the doctor must have read their minds because he was quick to reassure them that statistically it would no be likely that all four or even three follicles would be fertilized. She went on to tell us that the doctor was “completely thorough in giving us an escape route if we so chose. We simply could discontinue the injections and repeat the process in two months, aiming for enough but not too many follicles.”

Those sentences are also Kate-speak, to keep her doctor from blowing the whistle on the whole operation. She makes sure that we’re aware that the doctor did everything humanly possible to ensure that there was no risk of Higher Order Multiples, and he did his job to his fullest capacity.

Now all of this begs a question. If Kate was, indeed, so adamant about wanting “
just one more
” baby, why didn’t she just turn around and go home like her doctor suggested, and come back again in another two months to try again? It wasn’t a money issue because Jon’s dad was paying for everything. So why the big hurry?

If she had just listened to her doctor and tried again in a couple of months, she could have reduced the risk of fertilizing three, or possibly four, mature eggs, and would never have been subjected to the thought of “killing” any babies when her doctor suggested selective reduction. God would not have had a problem with Kate going home and trying again next time.

But Kate did come back, the very next day, and received her “one final injection of HCG” and then the IUI, and went home again to wait.

At least that’s what she was
supposed
to do. What Kate doesn’t mention in
Multiple Blessings
, or anywhere else for that matter, is what she
did
do during that “second cycle.” What Kate actually did when she got home was to immediately give herself at least one more shot of HCG, which she had purchased online in a kit three months earlier. To keep the purchase a secret, she went outside the United States and purchased the drug overseas and had it shipped to her newly created post office box in Wyomissing. She used the name K. Kauffman when ordering. Perhaps the only mistake she made is not destroying the HCG packaging.

With the IUI, Jon’s sperm were now swimming around inside of Kate’s uterus among the three or four mature eggs that the doctor knew about. Kate wasn’t looking for maybe two, or three, or even four babies this time around though, and she wasn’t about to leave anything to chance either. She knew that by
administering her own injection of HCG, even more mature eggs would drop down to join the others, unbeknownst to her “African doctor.”

After injecting herself with HCG, something happened twelve days later that didn’t go according to Kate’s master plan. She experienced pain… severe pain, and she was rushed to the hospital where it was discovered that she had over-stimulated ovaries.

For fear of anyone finding out what she had done, Kate kept silent about the additional HCG shot she had given herself. She writes in
Multiple Blessings
that over-stimulated ovaries like she experienced “are only evident in approximately 2 percent of women undergoing similar infertility treatment.” That’s pretty rare indeed. Indeed.

So by my calculation, only two women out of 100 have this problem. And honest, wholesome, God-fearing Katie Irene Gosselin just happened to be one of them.

Take a look at what the Mayo Clinic has to say about the cause of Ovarian Hyper stimulation Syndrome (over-stimulated ovaries):

“Ovarian Hyper stimulation Syndrome is particularly associated with injection of a hormone called
Human Chorionic Gonadotropin
(HCG) which is used for
triggering oocyte release
.
The risk is further increased by multiple doses of HCG after ovulation and if the procedure results in pregnancy.”

In an early, unedited version of
Multiple Blessings
, Kate wrote about her over-stimulated ovaries saying that neither she nor Jon even vaguely considered that the pain could possibly be related in any way to the HCG shot that she had gotten just a few weeks beforehand.

Kate changed this wording in the final version of
Multiple Blessings
, taking out any mention of the HCG shot and just referring broadly to fertility treatments. Even Kate knew that it would be best for her to mention HCG as little as possible so as not to arouse suspicion. In the printed book version Kate dropped the mention of the HCG shot and changed it to simply say ‘fertility treatments.’

Kate had researched infertility to the point where she had become an “expert” in the field. So
in her book when Kate says something like neither one of us at that point
even vaguely considered
that this pain could possibly be related in any way to the HCG shot…
it is impossible to not be very, very suspicious, at the very least.

Weeks after Kate’s hospitalization, she went back to see her doctor for the initial ultrasound. According to Kate, he was “in a trance,” and “visibly shaken.
” It’s no wonder he was visibly shaken. He was, no doubt, trying to figure out how three, possibly four, mature follicles had magically turned into seven.

In
Multiple Blessings,
Kate overstates her fear and horror and disappointment about the moment she learned she was pregnant with seven babies. She also makes sure to throw some statistics into the book so that readers would realize just how rare of an occurrence this was and, oh, of course, that it wasn’t her fault.

She says that she was instantly in a state of denial and simply could not allow her brain to process what her eyes were telling it. She said the chill of reality washed over her as she watche
d Jon drop to his knees at the sound of five. According to Kate Jon was fear stricken and nauseous and he couldn’t bear to look anymore. She said she and Jon sat in a stunned silence and that she was completely numb as she got dressed. She had an almost unbearable urge to run but the reality was that they had almost a better chance at winning the lottery she added.

While telling the world of her shock and stunned silence, Kate Gosselin did something else that would propel her into the hallowed halls of Christian heroism: she focused on the hot-button issue of selective reduction. Selective reduction is a procedure where the number of fetuses that result from infertility treatments like IUI is reduced to a safer number. When Kate portrayed herself as adamantly opposed to selective reduction, she immediately turned herself into an admirable Christian figure, thus ensuring a built-in audience of supporters and admirers. This would later serve her and her pocketbook very well. This is what she said on her and Jon’s earliest website:

“I will never forget this day as long as I live. There were seven sacs with four yolk sacs, or babies in four of them. At the count of four, I was scared. At five I started crying and at six I was shaking absolutely sobbing. Jon had turned form the screen, he couldn’t look anymore. I have never seen him so close to tears in my life! The doctor “reassured” us by telling us we would talk about reduction. I pulled myself together and stared right at him and said “We’re not doing reduction!” After the ultrasound he called us into his office and tried to convince us that reduction was the thing to do. Again, we refused!”

In
Multiple Blessings
regarding selective reduction, Kate said that at every single meeting with their doctor, she and Jon expressed serious reservations about the possibility of multiples and made sure that he fully understood their unwavering position on selective reduction. Kate said that selective reduction in her opinion is the politically correct term for the process by which a fetus is injected with a lethal dose of potassium chloride, which mercilessly silences its tiny heart forever. She went on to say that being Christians, they firmly believed that every life whether seconds old or a full forty-week life is designed and ordained from God. She said that because of that, they would never consider choosing to end that life in any way at any time. Period.

A standard topic in Kate’s countless paid church speaking engagements around the country was that she was absolutely dead set against selective reduction. That went over HUGE with her Christian audience. It’s what elevated Kate as a Christian speaker. It was exactly what they wanted to hear…and she knew it. Kate was fully aware of how powerful the issue was, so she overstated her conversations with her doctor about selective reduction in
Multiple Blessings
:

So on that fateful day in November of 2003, in the doctor’s office during the ultrasound where seven babies were detected, after being told
by
Kate
“at every single meeting”
with him that she was
against selective reduction, period
, why then would the doctor state calmly (as Kate tells us on page 35 of
Multiple Blessings
), “Kate, when you’re done here, come into my office, and we will talk about selective reduction.”? Because Kate Gosselin lied about ever mentioning selective reduction to him. She only brought it up for the first time
after
the seven babies had been seen in the ultrasound.

Kate had gotten exactly what she had w
anted and planned for; however, she said that she didn’t even know that words could describe that “horrible day.” She said it was “so horrible.” She wanted nothing more than to be pregnant but now she was pregnant with seven babies and “scared to death.”

But the fact is, Friday, November 21, 2003, will forever go down as the happiest day of Kate Gosselin’s life. That’s the day her plan unfolded exactly as her detailed, scheduled list and calendar said it would. Kate Gosselin was pregnant with seven babies.

“The lady doth protest too much, methinks.”

– William Shakespeare

Kate’s “just one more” lie was front and center during the
Jon & Kate Plus Ei8ht
television years. If you start at the very beginning, with the first television special on the Gosselin family, you’ll see and hear Kate already on the defensive – before anyone even questioned her about whether or not she intentionally set out to have multiples. The thought that Kate had planned to have Higher Order Multiples would NEVER have crossed my mind had Kate not gone on and on about how she in fact, did
not
plan to have multiples. The lady most certainly doth protest too much.

On the first episode of Season 1, it was “…Then, when we decided to have
Just one more
, we got a little more than we bargained for. We got six.”

By Season 5, it was “We were so thrilled, we decided to try for
Just one more
… and ended up with six.”

This is from Season 3 of
Jon & Kate Plus Ei8ht’s
Viewer Email FAQ episode on the interview couch. These FAQ episodes, as well as every other Gosselin episode, were very carefully scripted, with Kate having complete knowledge of every question that was to be asked of her. Most of the time, Kate and the producers wrote the questions themselves to push whatever agenda they were going for on any given week. Here are the fake questions from that episode.