Anecdotal, but... The problem with the above is -- it's, well, anecdotal (most likely filtered by the sense of indignance you felt upon hearing that "one case,

Anecdotal, but... The problem with the above is -- it's, well, anecdotal (most likely filtered by the sense of indignance you felt upon hearing that "one case, about a mother with 6 children who...", most likely dredged up by the local tabloids and blasted into the backs of everyone's eyeballs leaving a subjective imprint approximately 1000x its actual statistical significance). Along with, you know, that (true!) story about the mother with 5 children, a plurality of which managed to "fall in the bathtub and hit their heads real hard" before HHS caught on; or that other true story about the mother with 8 children who fed half of them quite sumptuously, while starving the other half, "to save money." The whole point being: the study in the article is about real data collected on a reasonably large-scale controlled trial -- not the set of random anecdotes that happen to be sticking to the back of your skull.