I don't really know what to say about this... which as my regular readers know, is pretty unusual for me. So, opening the floor for discussion, as they say.
What do you think? I just end up shaking my head in abject amazement. A 33-year-old woman with 14 kids? And no husband or grandma to help? Yow! Daisy's mouth is agape.
Grandma: Octuplets mom obsessed with having kids
By RAQUEL MARIA DILLON, Associated Press Writer
Sat Jan 31, 10:30 am ET
Forty-six doctors? (Holy shit, I don't think that came cheap.) As I said, I hardly know what to say. It appears the mom has already filed for bankruptcy:
LOS ANGELES – The woman who gave birth to octuplets this week conceived all 14 of her children through in vitro fertilization, is not married and has been obsessed with having children since she was a teenager, her mother said.
Angela Suleman told The Associated Press she was not supportive when her daughter, Nadya Suleman, decided to have more embryos implanted last year.
"It can't go on any longer," she said in a phone interview Friday. "She's got six children and no husband. I was brought up the traditional way. I firmly believe in marriage. But she didn't want to get married."
Nadya Suleman, 33, gave birth Monday in nearby Bellflower. She was expected to remain in the hospital for at least a few more days, and her newborns for at least a month.
A spokeswoman at Kaiser Permanente Bellflower Medical Center said the babies were doing well and seven were breathing unassisted.
While her daughter recovers, Angela Suleman is taking care of the other six children, ages 2 through 7, at the family home in Whittier, about 15 miles east of downtown Los Angeles.
She said she warned her daughter that when she gets home from the hospital, "I'm going to be gone."
Angela Suleman said her daughter always had trouble conceiving and underwent in vitro fertilization treatments because her fallopian tubes are "plugged up."
There were frozen embryos left over after her previous pregnancies and her daughter didn't want them destroyed, so she decided to have more children.
Her mother and doctors have said the woman was told she had the option to abort some of the embryos and, later, the fetuses. She refused.
Her mother said she does not believe her daughter will have any more children.
"She doesn't have any more (frozen embryos), so it's over now," she said. "It has to be."
Nadya Suleman wanted to have children since she was a teenager, "but luckily she couldn't," her mother said.
"Instead of becoming a kindergarten teacher or something, she started having them, but not the normal way," he mother said.
Her daughter's obsession with children caused Angela Suleman considerable stress, so she sought help from a psychologist, who told her to order her daughter out of the house.
"Maybe she wouldn't have had so many kids then, but she is a grown woman," Angela Suleman said. "I feel responsible and I didn't want to throw her out."
Yolanda Garcia, 49, of Whittier, said she helped care for Nadya Suleman's autistic son three years ago.
"From what I could tell back then, she was pretty happy with herself, saying she liked having kids and she wanted 12 kids in all," Garcia told the Long Beach Press-Telegram.
"She told me that all of her kids were through in vitro, and I said 'Gosh, how can you afford that and go to school at the same time?"' she added. "And she said it's because she got paid for it."
Garcia said she did not ask for details.
Nadya Suleman holds a 2006 degree in child and adolescent development from California State University, Fullerton, and as late as last spring she was studying for a master's degree in counseling, college spokeswoman Paula Selleck told the Press-Telegram.
Her fertility doctor has not been identified. Her mother told the Los Angeles Times all the children came from the same sperm donor but she declined to identify him.
Birth certificates reviewed by The Associated Press identify a David Solomon as the father for the four oldest children. Certificates for the other children were not immediately available.
The news that the octuplets' mother already had six children sparked an ethical debate. Some medical experts were disturbed to hear that she was offered fertility treatment, and troubled by the possibility that she was implanted with so many embryos.
Others worried that she would be overwhelmed trying to raise so many children and would end up relying on public support.
The eight babies — six boys and two girls — were delivered by Cesarean section weighing between 1 pound, 8 ounces and 3 pounds, 4 ounces. Forty-six physicians and staff assisted in the deliveries.
Octuplets' Family Filed For BankruptcyBELLFLOWER, California
Jan. 30, 2009
So, there is also the additional question of just how all of these babies occurred... I mean, you don't think mainstream medicine in the USA is UNETHICAL ((gasp)) do you? Banish the thought!
(CBS) CBS News has learned that the family of the octuplets born this week outside Los Angeles filed for bankruptcy and abandoned a home a little over a year-and-a-half ago.
Early Show national correspondent Hattie Kauffman says the mother is in her mid-thirties and lives with her parents.
There's been no mention of the octuplets' father, Kauffman observes.
The grandfather, she adds, is apparently going to head back to his native Iraq to earn money for the growing family. He told CBS News he's a former Iraqi military man.
Kauffman reported Thursday, and the octuplets' maternal grandmother now confirms to the Los Angeles Times, that the babies' mother already had six young children.
And a family acquaintance had told Kauffman that two of the six other kids are twins, and the six range in age from about two to about seven.
The mother's name is still being kept under wraps.
But her mother, Angela Suleman, also tells the newspaper her daughter conceived the octuplets through a fertility program.
Suleman told the Times her daughter had embryos implanted and, "They all happened to take."
On The Early Show Friday, the scientific director of an Atlanta-area fertility clinic blasted whichever clinic did the implantations, saying he's "stunned."
Doctors at the hospital where the octuplets were born, Kaiser Permanente Bellflower Medical Center in Bellflower, Calif., some 17 miles southeast of L.A., say the patient came to them already three months pregnant.
Asked at a news conference whether fertility assistance should be provided for a mother who already has multiple children, Dr. Harold Henry, part of the team that delivered the octuplets, said, "Kaiser has no policy on that," adding that doctors counseled the woman on her options.
"The options," said Henry, "were to continue the pregnancy or to selectively abort. The patient chose to continue the pregnancy."
Dr. Karen Maples, who also helped deliver the octuplets, read a statement from the mother saying, "My family and I are ecstatic about all of their arrivals."
The woman and her children live in a neighborhood of small, one-story homes, Kauffman reports, all with two-to-three bedrooms at most. Soon, she pointed out, there will be 14 children and at least three adults living in one of the homes -- until the grandfather heads back to his native Iraq.
Kauffman says unanswered questions include where the woman got the fertility treatments and how they were paid for.
On The Early Show Friday, Michael Tucker, scientific director of Georgia Reproductive Specialists, says all these developments leave him "stunned. As the story's unfolded and it's gone from the potential use of just fertility drugs, or misuse thereof, to actual, apparently, IVF (in-vitro fertilization) with transfer of embryos, this is just remarkable to me that any practitioner in our field of reproductive medicine would undertake such a practice."
Tucker, who has a doctorate in reproductive physiology, says it's "absolutely" possible the octuplets' mother got pregnant with them by taking fertility drugs on her own without the help of a clinic, "and that seemed the most plausible scenario, simply because the profession, we're policed by the American Society of Reproductive Medicine, has focused so minutely on the fact that we need to reduce the number of embryos that we transfer. We really are all about seeking the one, the one embryo that's going to make the healthy, single-born baby.
"And this kind of multiple plethora excess of babies is too much of a good thing. And it's rather a slap in the face of the whole profession, simply because it's going in the wrong direction.
"And it's unfortunate," Arthur Kaplan from UPenn (University of Pennsylvania) said, "the media tend to go goo-goo gaga over this and, in fact, it's really a bit of a medical disaster."
"Had she walked into a fertility clinic and said, 'Listen, I've got other children, the oldest seven, the youngest two,' co-anchor Julie Chen asked Tucker, "is there any ethical responsibility on the clinic's part to say, 'I'm not going to treat you,' or, 'You know what? This is not a good idea?" '
"Suffice to say," Tucker responded, "I've been in this business for 25 years now. And it's pretty much standard practice in all clinics to have some form of psychological evaluation of the patient. Also, their sociological circumstances. And I'm stunned, actually, that a clinic would proceed to treat a patient in this circumstance and then even to get to perhaps the transfer of embryos and ponder the transfer in, I believe, the lady's mid-30s, a 35-year-old -- she should be receiving two embryos, maximum, as a transfer into her uterus to have had eight transferred is somewhat -- is extremely irresponsible."