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

by Robert Hoffman

  Ask yourself if this makes sense. If you were a young woman, as Kate was at the time, and you easily got pregnant with twins the first time around using Intrauterine Insemination (IUI), and you really, really only wanted JUST ONE MORE baby, why would you go against your doctor’s recommendation to switch to In Vitro Fertilization (IVF)? Why would you go out and find a different doctor who had no problem with giving you IUI again, even though you KNEW the risk of having multiples was much, much greater using this method?

  Being so young and having already had twins via IUI, the logical thing to do, if Kate truly wanted JUST ONE MORE baby, would have been to follow her first infertility doctor’s recommendation to use IVF with a single embryo transfer. There would have been no real chance of twins, triplets, or even worse – Higher Order Multiples. If successful, Kate would have gotten JUST ONE MORE baby.

  Kate wasn’t a naive, 17-year-old girl who was ignorant about fertility issues. She was a registered labor and delivery nurse with plenty of experience. She was also, by her own admission, a type A planner, scheduler and list maker – and masterminder. Kate knew exactly what she was doing. She didn’t take her first doctor’s advice, because JUST ONE MORE baby was exactly what Kate Gosselin did NOT want. So she left that doctor behind. That doctor was no longer on board with Kate’s plan, and Kate wanted nothing more to do with her.

  Someone who worked with Kate’s first infertility doctor said that “Kate Gosselin was told by Doctor X to use IVF, and that made her angry. ‘Who is she to tell me what I can and can’t do with my body,’ Kate demanded.”

  I’ve met with that person, and a second individual from that doctor’s office, several times in the course of writing this book. In wanting to protect their careers and their own families, they have chosen to remain anonymous.

  In Kate’s early drafts of Multiple Blessings, she gives the names of her infertility doctors. Strangely, they were omitted from the final version of the book. There is a very logical reason for that: Kate didn’t want people asking questions.

  But that’s jumping ahead. Let’s go back to the beginning where this story gets a whole lot worse.

  ON THE JOB TRAINING

  Kate asked a lot of strange “what-iffy” kind of questions while working briefly as a nurse. “She seemed to have an agenda, but at the time, we had no idea what she was up to,” a former co-worker of Kate’s told me. “Looking back, it makes a lot more sense now. The questions she was asking had nothing to do with her job at the time. She talked about the McCaughey septuplets a lot and how dangerous it must have been for the mother.” “Kate was also very interested in the many different fertility medications that were out there, and what each one did, even though we weren’t a fertility clinic. It just seemed strange. She already knew everything there was to know about infertility by the sound of her, but she seemed to be looking for reinforcement and first-hand stories.”

  So, how did Kate end up with six babies when she wanted just one more? Here is the answer: she found a doctor who didn’t ask questions, and she manipulated the entire infertility process to get the results she wanted. In Multiple Blessings, Kate tells us that Jon “finally” agreed to do fertility treatments again so Kate dove for the phone and made an appointment with a new fertility doctor closer to home, in Wyomissing, PA. She told us that she drove an hour each way with the first fertility doctor and of course it was a very successful experience, but she felt that the convenience of seeing a doctor closer to home made much more sense now, because she had two two-year-olds at home.

  That paragraph is loaded with “Kate speak” and deception. Kate Gosselin is a creature of habit, almost obsessive-compulsively, and she had great success with her first infertility doctor in Allentown, PA, who gave her perfectly healthy twin girls. So the thought of Kate not going back to this same doctor because it was an inconvenient drive is so over-the-top false that my head spun when I read it.

  Remember, I followed Kate seven days a week for close to two years. I know her habits. She’s as hard to figure out as a third-grader. Kate drove an hour each way to get her hair styled in Harrisburg. She drove almost an hour each way to go to Whole Foods for a bag of groceries. She drove an hour each way to go shopping at the Park City Mall in Lancaster (all while her now EIGHT busy kids were at home with strangers), so the idea that she wouldn’t drive an hour to see her infertility specialist, the most important person in the world to someone who was trying to get pregnant, and who gave Kate her beautiful twins, is absolutely, positively, preposterous. Period. Nothing could be further from the truth. Kate Gosselin would never do that in a million years.

  Kate’s second infertility doctor, from Wyomissing, PA, whose practice is less than one mile from my front door, was there when Kate originally went searching for doctors. Why then did Kate pass on him and drive all the way to Allentown in the first place? That’s an easy one. She did so because she thought the Allentown doctor was a more respected and reputable doctor.

  Kate did the research. The reason Kate settled on her Wyomissing doctor the second time around was because the Allentown specialist rejected Kate when she returned and wanted that doctor to do IUI again. Her first doctor instructed Kate that it would be irresponsible for her to use IUI again, given her still young age and the fact that she had gotten pregnant so easily the first time around – with twins. She wanted Kate to do IVF with a single embryo transfer to start, and informed her that if this didn’t work, she would agree to IUI. Kate became irate and left the office – for good.

  Kate had masterminded her entire plan, and IVF and the thought of having just one more baby was not a part of it. So she ended up settling for the Wyomissing doctor.

  Kate realized that the infertility doctor is just a minor player in the whole baby-producing process. Dr. Botti, her maternity doctor, was the real brains of the operation and someone Kate respects and speaks very highly of, very often. Why do you suppose that Kate never mentions the names of either of her infertility doctors who gave her perfect twins and sextuplets? After all, these doctors were the conduits between God and science, right?

  In Multiple Blessings, the only mention of Dr. xxxxxxx is that he was her “African Doctor.” I know his name. In fact, I’ve been to his office several times. Wyomissing is a small town. It’s hard to not know a friend of a friend who works anywhere around here, and nurses and staff at a local doctor’s office are no exception. Anyway, Kate found herself a new doctor who would give IUI treatments for her undiagnosed case of PCOS.

  Kate’s doctor gave her injections of a drug called Human Chorionic Gonadotropin, or HCG, which is an ovulation inducer that would help Kate ovulate and release her eggs. Since Kate never really had PCOS in the first place, her eggs were released on their own, so adding injections of HCG to the mix would only serve to release even more eggs for possible fertilization. (For the men or other scientifically challenged: Ovulation occurs when a mature egg is released from the ovary, pushed down the fallopian tube, and is available to be fertilized.)

  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 described 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 woul
d 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 watched 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 seve
n 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 wanted 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.