Nadya Suleman, 33, gave birth Monday in nearby Bellflower, Calif. She was expected to remain in 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 two through seven, at the family home in Whittier, about 25 kilometres 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 Nadya Suleman 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, Calif., 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 counselling, 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 one pound, eight ounces and three pounds, four ounces. Forty-six physicians and staff assisted in the deliveries.
