LOS ANGELES — The mother who gave birth to octuplets acknowledged Monday that she was “fixated” on having children and “may not have really deep down wanted that many siblings” for her six other children.
Nadya Suleman made her comments in an interview aired on NBC’s “Today” show. Asked if she was deluded into thinking her six children wanted a bigger family, Suleman replied: “Not really deluded myself, but I knew that’s what I wanted.”
Suleman also identified the West Coast IVF Clinic in Beverly Hills as the provider of in-vitro fertilization for all 14 of her children.
Video from a 2006 report that was re-aired Monday on KTLA-TV shows Dr. Michael Kamrava from the clinic treating Suleman and discussing the implantation process.
Suleman did not name her doctor in the NBC interview but said the same doctor helped her conceive all 14 of her children at the clinic.
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Without identifying the doctor, the Medical Board of California said last week it was looking into the matter to see if there was a “violation of the standard of care” for implanting so many embryos.
The medical board’s Web site lists no previous actions taken against the doctor by the state.
Kamrava did not immediately return a pager message left by The Associated Press and a receptionist at the clinic said he was not giving interviews.
Suleman, 33, of Whittier already had six children when she gave birth on Jan. 26 to octuplets.
Medical ethicists have expressed shock that a doctor would implant so many embryos. National guidelines put the norm at two to three embryos for a woman of Suleman’s age in order to lessen the health risks to the mother and the chances of multiple births.
Suleman said she had six embryos implanted for each of her pregnancies. The octuplets were a surprise result of her last set of six embryos, she said, explaining she had expected twins at most.
Suleman told “Today” her doctor “did nothing wrong” and said the doctor had warned her of possible complications to the pregnancy and risks to the development of the babies.
On Sunday, Suleman’s mother Angela Suleman seemed to contradict her daughter’s account, telling a Web site the fertility specialist who helped her daughter give birth to the octuplets was different from the one who aided in the birth of her first six children.
In an interview with celebrity news Web site RadarOnline.com, Angela Suleman, whose daughter and grandchildren live with her, said she and her husband pleaded with Nadya’s first fertility doctor not to treat their daughter again. She said her daughter went to another doctor.
“I’m really angry about that,” Angela Suleman said of the doctor’s decision to perform the procedure.
“She already has six beautiful children, why would she do this?” Angela Suleman said. “I’m struggling to look after her six. We had to put in bunk beds, feed them in shifts and there’s children’s clothing piled all over the house.”
The Web site posted photographs from inside Suleman’s disheveled three-bedroom home. Heaps of clothing pour from an open closet door and a carpeted bedroom, where a bedsheet serves as a curtain, is cluttered with cribs.
Angela Suleman said Nadya’s boyfriend was the biological father of all 14 children, but that she refused to marry him.
“He was in love with her and wanted to marry her,” she said. “But Nadya wanted to have children on her own.”
Nadya Suleman’s publicist Mike Furtney said that his client has been away for nearly two months, so she shouldn’t be held responsible for the home’s current condition.
Furtney said his client planned to move into a larger home once the octuplets were healthy enough to leave their doctors’ care.
He declined to comment on any of the remarks Angela Suleman made about her daughter in the interview.
“Those are very personal issues between a mother and a daughter,” he said.
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