She clearly needs help.
The California woman who gave birth to octuplets is a single mom who already has six other children - and as if that's not enough, they all live with her parents, who last year went bankrupt.
Octo-mom Nadya Suleman, 33, works in a fertility clinic and used the same sperm donor for all 14 kids, neighbors told The Post.
In addition to her octuplets, she has three sets of twins, aged 5, 3, and 2, neighbors said.
Last night Suleman's mom, Angela, improbably insisted that science played no role in the production of this massive brood.
"She was not on fertility drugs," Angela Suleman told The Post.
Suleman's father Ed, a Palestinian immigrant who hails from Jerusalem, brought bags of cookies and diapers into the family's three-bedroom house yesterday. He said the eight new bundles of joy were "God's wish," and added, "I have no idea what to do with God."
Nadya Suleman gave birth to the octuplets Monday at Kaiser Permanente Bellflower Medical Center.
Her father said, "They're all fine."
Suleman's parents were almost $1 million in debt and declared bankruptcy in March 2008 after foreclosure proceedings began on one of their homes. Ed then went to Iraq to do translation work as a contractor to earn extra money for the family.
Nadya did not plan to have eight babies at once, her mother, Angela, said - in fact, doctors advised her to consider selectively reducing the number of fetuses. But she ignored advice about the risks to both her and her babies, she said.
"What do you suggest she should have done? She refused to have them killed," Angela told the Los Angeles Times, insisting her daughter "is not evil." "That is a very painful thing."
Nadya never expected all eight embryos would take, her mom said.
The birth of octuplets to a single mother with six prior children posed a slew of ethical questions, experts said,.
During in vitro fertilization, the ovaries are stimulated to release an excessive number of eggs, which then are surgically retrieved and fertilized in a petri dish.
Fertility doctors typically never transfer more than two embryos at a time when a woman is under the age of 35 - and transferring eight is a gross violation of accepted practice, according to the American Society for Reproductive Medicine.
"I would never do that," said Dr. Jamie Grifo of the NYU Fertility Center, who helped create some of the guidelines currently in place.
"Sometimes patients ask us to do crazy things, but most of the time we are able to precounsel them about the risks," he said. "Some clinics have much poorer success rates and therefore put back many more embryos."
Although twins are common with in-vitro pregnancies, high-order multiples are rare, Grifo said.
If a patient is staunchly anti-abortion and opposed to selective reduction, the doctor has an ethical responsibility to steer them away from situations that could result in high-order multiple births, experts said.
But doctors do not believe it is their place to dictate how many children women can have.
"I don't think it's our job to tell them how many babies they're allowed to have.," Grifo said.
It's unclear where Suleman received her fertility treatments, but based on the success of her prior three sets of twins, there was no medical reason to transfer eight embryos, Grifo said.
It also is unclear how she is going to get the money to pay for 14 children - though welfare is generous in California, which has three times more people getting assistance than any other state.
According to one neighbor, Suleman used the same sperm donor for all 14 kids. The donor was an acquaintance, who after getting married recently, asked her no longer to use his sperm, a neighbor said. "But she did it anyway," the neighbor said.
The six boys and two girls are only the second set of octuplets born alive in the US. They were delivered nine weeks premature and ranged between 1 pound, 8 ounces and 3 pounds, 4 ounces at birth.
Dr. Mandhir Gupta said seven of the babies were breathing without assistance. One was still receiving oxygen through a tube in his nose.
No comments:
Post a Comment