Nadya Suleman, mother of fourteen children, recently gave birth to octuplets in California.  After several miscarriages and a divorce and still wanting to start a family Suleman pursued in-vitro fertilization treatment at a California clinic.  She had six children in five pregnanies through 2006 with IVF.  She had six remaining embryos at the clinic and asked her doctor to implant them all at once.  Suleman says that the chance one embryo will implant is about 60% but she was informed that there was a very small chance that all embryos would implant and some may even split. 

Watch Nadya Suleman’s interview with Ann Curry:

Suleman’s mother, Angela, is the primary care giver for the children. She says she was "practically raising" her six grandchildren even before Nadya gave birth to eight more siblings.  Angela did not support Nadya’s decision to implant her six remaining fertilizaed embryos in an effort at one more pregnancy:

She justified it by saying that those frozen embryos were living human beings, however to me, anything frozen is not living and she did not have to have them thawed and she could have also if she wanted to donated them to couples that  have no children but to have them all is unconscionable to be.  She really has no idea what she is doing to her children… and to me.

You can watch Angela Suleman’s interview with RadarOnline.com here.

For more on this story check out Kathryn Joyce’s “The Big Families We Love to Hate.”