Good Lord.  Should there be a law?  Hmm.  I think there should, yes.  I understand people want kids, but I think it’s usually a safer bet that, say, four children at once is better for all parties concerned than eight.  What about even one kid?  Shocking, right?  The question, though, is how this decrease of children will occur: is this by implanting fewer embryos or by aborting the “extras”?  Because obviously, for Catholics, those two options are pretty dramatically different.  Here’s a bit from an article about this question in Time:

Richard Paulson, director of the fertility program at the University of Southern California, helped write the original professional recommendations regarding embryo transfer. Although he decries the birth of triplets, he’s irritated at calls to legislate assisted reproduction. Doctors aren’t the problem, he contends; laws are. Some European countries limit the number of embryos transferred, but that doesn’t allow for physicians to take into account individual medical histories; generally, the older the patient, the less likely embryos will implant.

The California octuplets are only the second set to be born in U.S. history. “We’re picking out this incredibly rare event, and all of a sudden, we want to pass laws,” says Paulson. “Would we write laws limiting the size of someone’s family to six? Would we write laws mandating selective reduction?” he asks, referring to the option of aborting some embryos if a high number successfully implant in the uterus. “Restricting reproductive rights would be a minefield.”

In the meantime, the subject of how the California woman came to deliver eight babies — 10 years after a Houston woman gave birth to the first-known living octuplets — is preoccupying fertility doctors across the country. The ASRM is caught up in the craziness too. “If this resulted from an IVF treatment, we can say that transferring eight embryos in an IVF cycle is well beyond our guidelines,” the group’s president, R. Dale McClure, said in a statement issued four days after Kaiser Permanente Medical Center in Bellflower, a Los Angeles suburb, announced the babies’ birth. “We have a process for looking into these kind of matters and taking appropriate action.”