The desire to have children is a very normal, biological urge, and there are plenty of people out there who thrive with big families and big challenges. But what happens when that biological drive overruns all common sense, and bearing as many children as possible become the dominent motivation in a woman’s life? Should she be feted by the media queens and the magazines, or simply ordered to get some kind of psychological care and supervision by the state?
I’m not a psychologist, but I suspect that if this woman does have a mental illness that causes her to “collect” biological offspring, it’s because she’s got a variation of that same version of obsessive-compulsive disorder that occasionally causes “cat lady” behavior. Animal hoarding is a known psychological disorder, and most people who live in a city have heard at least one of those stories about a local person who got caught with dozens or even hundreds of cats that were unintentionally being tortured by a person whose mental illness makes it hard for her to see what she’s doing clearly. There needs to be a lot more research on animal hoarding, but here’s an overview of some theories about how to characterize it in relation to other mental illnesses. Small children aren’t animals, of course, but I could easily see that animal hoarding behavior could extend to children.