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Octuplets' Mom: Can She Afford to Raise 14 Kids?

Grandmother of Octuplets, Who Shares a Home With the Mom of the Eight Babies, Filed for Bankruptcy Last Year; Reportedly Says Daughter's Obsessed With Kids

By SABINA GHEBREMEDHIN, ALICE GOMSTYN and DAN CHILDS

Jan. 31, 2009

The California woman who gave birth to octuplets on Monday, although once married, apparently had all 14 of her kids out of wedlock by artificial means -- and various public records raise questions about the family's ability to support them.

ABC News has learned through San Bernardino Superior Court Records that the 33-year-old California woman, whose name is Nadya Doud (she filed to have her name changed to Nadya Suleman in 2001 -- though it was not clear if the request was granted), divorced her husband, Marcos Gutierrez, in January 2008.

The document indicates "no children of the marriage," suggesting that Gutierrez was not the father of Doud's previous six children.

Meanwhile, the woman's mother, Angela Suleman, said her daughter has been obsessed with having children since she was a teenager, according to an interview she gave late Friday with the Associated Press.

Angela Suleman told the AP that all 14 children were conceived through in vitro fertilization, because her daughter had always had trouble conceiving because her fallopian tubes were "plugged up.'' She said that while all the kids came from a single sperm donor, the donor is not Marcos Guitierrez.

An AP review of birth records identifies a David Solomon as the father of the oldest four children.

Doud lived with Gutierrez for about three-and-a-half years from August 1996 until January 2000, when she moved back with her parents, Edward Doud Suleman and Angela Suleman, living at several addresses, records show. The parents were granted a divorce in Las Vegas in 1999, but evidently still live together.

Within a few years of living with Gutierrez, Doud began having her 14 children.

Another set of court documents may raise the question of whether Doud will be able to afford care for all those kids. The public records indicate that Doud's mother filed for bankruptcy in March 2008.

The family currently lives in a three-bedroom home in suburban Los Angeles.

As of March, Edward Doud Suleman, apparently the octuplets' grandfather, was working in Iraq, according to the bankruptcy filing. The couple's combined monthly income was listed as roughly $8,740, but the filing indicated that Angela Suleman expected their income would rise from her husband's employment. It said that he would earn $100,000 a year. The document did not specify Suleman's husband's occupation, but Suleman told the Los Angeles Times that her husband was a contractor.

Angela Suleman told the newspaper that her daughter had had fertility treatment but never expected the treatment would result in eight babies.

She said that raising 14 children "was going to be difficult."

No matter what your income, giving birth and caring for octuplets is an expensive proposition. The infants' delivery was performed by a team of 46 doctors, nurses and surgical assistants stationed in four delivery rooms at Kaiser Permanente Bellflower Medical Center in Bellflower, Calif., and it likely cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

"You can think of it as an eightfold increase on a singleton birth," said Steven M. Donn, director of the Division of Neonatal-Perinatal Medicine at the University of Michigan Health System. "By comparison, the mother's care will probably be a bargain."

Costs for the average delivery of a full-term pregnancy range from $9,000 to $25,000, depending on whether the baby is delivered by Caesarean section or vaginally. Eight times $25,000 is a whopping $200,000.

But Donn said the cost of the octuplets' delivery likely exceeded that number because doctors prepared for the risks associated with a multiple-birth delivery.

"For reasons we don't completely understand, risks with multifetal deliveries are greater than [normal births]," Donn said.

The medical costs for babies born preterm, like the California octuplets, which were born nine weeks premature, are also above average.

"The real significant costs come on the pediatric side, particularly when it comes to neonatal intensive care," said Dr. Geeta Swamy, a maternal-fetal specialist at Duke University Medical Center.

A full-term pregnancy lasts from 38 to 42 weeks, according to the National Institutes of Health, and Swamy estimated for babies born at 30 weeks the hospital stay could be "anywhere from six weeks to six months."

For an infant stay in a neonatal intensive care unit, costs can add up to "a few thousand a day," she said.

"So we are looking at probably several hundreds of thousands of dollars for the family. If it is $100,000 per baby, for example, then it would be $800,000 for all eight," Swamy said.



Octuplets' Birth Raises Ethical Questions
Sally, a next-door neighbor and family acquaintance who requested only her first name be used, said her past conversations with the Doud indicated that she may have used assisted reproduction in her earlier pregnancies.

Sally said that the mother had told her that all six of her previous children also were conceived through artificial means.

University of Pennsylvania bioethicist Arthur Caplan said there are serious ethical concerns surrounding the decision to move forward with multiple-fetus pregnancies -- particularly if the babies were conceived through in-vitro fertilization, which Suleman has indicated was the case with her daughter.

"Anyone who transfers eight embryos should be arrested for malpractice," Caplan said.

Studies have shown that the tendency toward prematurity and low birth weight in multiple-birth babies puts them at greater risk for a variety of complications, including respiratory problems at birth, cerebral palsy, birth defects, sensory disorders and even death. These risks increase as the number of babies in the multiple birth increases.

Dr. Richard Paulson, chief of the Division of Reproductive Endocrinology and Infertility at the University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine, agreed that multiple births are a problem that should be avoided at all costs.

"Even though this story has a positive spin, it should be seen as a very serious complication of fertility treatment," Paulson said. "Patients who conceive octuplets would routinely be offered -- even advised -- selective reduction. I have to assume that in this case, the patients decided to try and carry to viability, and they were lucky, plus they got some really good doctors."



Octuplets' Tab Will Continue to Climb
When the infants leave the hospital, the bills will keep piling up.

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture's new Cost of Raising a Child Calculator -- a new tool the department has developed to help parents prepare for expenses and life insurance -- a middle-class family living in the western United States can expect to spend at least $9,171 on year's worth of housing, food, transportation, clothing, health, education and other expenses for a single child under the age of 1.

For eight children under the age of 1, that number mushrooms to $73,368.

Projected costs keep climbing as the children get older, according to the USDA calculator. By the time the children are 17, their parents can expect to spend at least $10,133 on each child annually, or $81,064 total for the year.

Overall, from birth through high school, the family will spend a projected $171,926 per child, for a total of $1,375,408.

"The kids are going to grow up in an environment where being frugal is part of life," said Kathy Peel, the author of "The Busy Mom's Guide to a Happy, Organized Home."

Peel, a mother of three from Houston, said she believes the projections devised through the USDA calculator are low.

She said she doubted, for instance, that a family would spend $308 per year on an infant's clothing, as estimated by the USDA. Disposable diapers alone, she said, could cost about $72 a month for a single child. For eight babies, that would total nearly $7,000 a year.

Peel said that while the family can save money by buying goods in bulk, it will lose out on the cost benefits of "hand-me-down" clothing -- with all the children being the same age, she said, there won't be any clothes left to hand down.

And then there are the costs beyond adolescence, like college. By the time the octuplets turn 18 in 2027, the Web site SavingforCollege.com projects that four-year tuition at a public university will cost $87,200 per student.

If all eight octuplets head to a public college, the family could find itself stuck with tuition bills totalling nearly $700,000. That sum rises if any of the children go to a more expensive private college.

"The good news for this family is I'm sure they're going to be given a lot of things that will be very helpful," said Peel.



The Gosselin Family
In years past, families with sextuplets -- six infants born at the same time -- have received everything from free cars to new homes to guaranteed college tuition.

Jon and Kate Gosselin, the parents of twins and sextuplets and the stars of the television show "Jon & Kate Plus Eight" on the TLC network, speak openly about the free vacations they've received in exchange for free publicity on their show. Kate Gosselin also received a free tummy tuck courtesy of a physician who was also featured on the show.

The Chukwu family, who gave birth to the first-known octuplets, one of which died a week after birth, put out a call for donations when the children were born in Texas in 1998. It worked: They received cash contributions, volunteer help with child care, a year's worth of grocery and diaper donations and more.

Nkem Chukwu, the octuplets' mother, said the support the family received after the birth proved critical. She said the California octuplets' family should also ask for help.

"They need help. They need support from their community, from their church," she said.

And, she added, they have to "take it easy, just one day at a time."

With reports from ABC News' Allison Ehrlich, Joanna Schaffhausen and Gina Sunseri.

Copyright © 2009 ABC News Internet Ventures

http://www.abcnews.go.com/Health/WomensHealth/story?id=6774471&page=1

Sew em all shut...

Science only asks "Can we do this?". I wish sometimes, instead, it would ask "Should we?".

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"Anyone who transfers eight embryos should be arrested for malpractice," Caplan said.

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That woman is sick, and the doctors who did this ought to be shot. Now we've got a mentally ill woman with 14 children instead of 6. She needed psychotherapy, not more children.

"A single mother of 6 comes to the fertility clinic choosing to have multiple birth"..... that sounds like the beginning of a joke.

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Heck, maybe President Obama will appoint me to a cabinet position.

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LMAO! sorry Arch...But no way You could ever step foot towards somthing like that

8 kids at once?????

If I had 8 kids at once, I'd think I'd died and gone to hell.

I don't want any babies, so I don't think I'd have six to begin with. hehe

From The Sunday TimesFebruary 1, 2009

Octuplets’ mother wants Oprah to turn her into a $2m TV star

John Harlow, Los Angeles
Times (UK)

THE single mother of octuplets born in California last week is seeking $2m (£1.37m) from media interviews and commercial sponsorship to help pay the cost of raising the children.


Nadya Suleman, 33, plans a career as a television childcare expert after it emerged last week that she already had six children before giving birth on Monday. She now has 14 below the age of eight.


Although still confined to an LA hospital bed, she intends to talk to two influential television hosts this week — media mogul Oprah Winfrey, and Diane Sawyer, who presents Good Morning America.


Her family has told agents she needs cash from deals such as nappy sponsorship — she will get through 250 a week in the next few months — and the agents will gauge public reaction to her story.


Her earning power, though, could be diminished by a growing ethical and medical controversy. Experts believe that the unnamed fertility specialists who gave her in vitro fertilisation (IVF) should not have implanted so many embryos, and in choosing to carry all eight to term, Suleman ignored guidelines, risking both their health and her own.


US public reaction has been mixed: many have asked how an unemployed single mother can raise 14 children, as her first six have already strained the family budget. Angela and Ed Suleman, Nadya’s parents,bought her a two-bedroom bungalow in the suburb of Whittier in March 2007, but soon after got into debt and had to leave their own home.


They filed for bankruptcy and moved in with their daughter and grandchildren. Last week her father said he would return to his native Iraq to work as a translator and driver.


Angela Suleman, who is caring for the first six children — one of whom is autistic — while her daughter is in hospital, said yesterday that she had consulted a psychologist over Nadya’s “obsession with children”.


Nadya Suleman, who describes herself as a “professional student” living off education grants and parental money, broke up with her boyfriend before the birth of her first child seven years ago.


The identity of the octuplets’ father remains unknown, but local reports suggest they were conceived with frozen sperm donated by a friend she met while working at a fertility clinic. He is the father of her twins, born two years ago.


Michael Tucker of the Georgia Reproductive Clinic, Atlanta, said Suleman’s story stunned him. “We are policed by the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, which frowns upon implanting more than two or three embryos at a time. It is remarkable that any practitioner would undertake such a practice.”


The babies, born nine weeks prematurely by C-section, were attended to by 46 medical staff, who expected seven babies. When the eighth — a boy — appeared, doctors were “confounded”.


Angela Suleman said her daughter was advised to terminate some of the embryos in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy for the sake of her health, but she refused because she did not know how to make such a life-or-death decision.


“She doesn’t have any more, so it’s over now. It has to be,” said the grandmother.

Somebody needs to lock this nutcase up, and put the kids up for adoption.

If anybody rewards this idiot for her sick behavior, they ought to be shot along with the doctor that implanted 8 embryos into her uterus. She wants a payout for using diapers? Let her use the old fashioned cloth ones that she has to clean herself.

Reminds me of the caption on that poster of the family with 20 kids ... "It's A Uterus, Not A Clown Car.".

Those poor kids.

Weird. Not even Angelina Jolie would do something like that.

At least Angelina Jolie can afford to support 14 kids if she ever did do something like this...

I love babies, and I love being pregnant, but I know my limits and I know that I cannot afford to raise 14 kids on what comes into this household now. I am not about to depend on a non-existant tv deal or fundraisers.

j/c DC

Apparently this woman was interviewed for a segment on the "Today" show which airs Monday according to an article on "People" magazine's website. Anyways NBC did some digging and according to this article she (Nadya Suleman) recieved $168,000 in disability benefits for back pain because of injuries she suffered from a 1999 riot at a California mental hospital where she worked at the time. Due to the injury doctors precluded her from taking any job that required prolonged sitting,standing, or walking.

Shortly before the money from her claim runs out she has the insemination done. Also back in 2001 she filed an additional claim cause she her car was rear ended while leaving a doctor's office for treatment to her back and she argued that she wouldn't have been there if she wasn't going for treatments to her back.

It almost sounds to me that this woman is just looking for a free ride and she watched too many of those "Multi" kids show (Jon & Kate plus 8) and thought she could get paid by TV too or at least get her story on TV and have people feel sorry for her and send her stuff for free.

Here's a link to the article on People's site: LINK

I'm not sure why anyone would be surprised about this story. America pretty much encourages people to sit on their asses and collect money and benefits from others.

I saw a snippet of an interview that she's doing with the Today show Monday. She says she wants some government assistance so she can go to school and get a master's degree in counseling. This leads me to ask two questions:

How in the hell is she going to be able to go to school with 14 kids under the age of 8?

Who in the hell is going to seek counseling from this nutjob?

Sure, I'd love to pay for her massive family and her education. All you big government lovers.....keep on telling me how the money I earn is going to help such deserving people. Wonderful!

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America pretty much encourages people to sit on their asses and collect money and benefits from others.

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Maybe it's because of my age and the time I grew up in, or maybe it's the way I was raised,,, dunno, but that statement doesn't apply to me.

I would love nothing better than when the time comes, to not have to accept Social Security (that's if it still exists that is) I'd love to say,, no thank you.

I've not saved enough in my life time thus far and I doubt I will accomplish it in the next 9 years either, to be able to just say no to SS. I'm kinda sad that I didn't think far enough ahead to put more away.

Without a doubt, I'll need Medicare/aid plus a supplimental plan... That erks me as well.

Now I know this is gonna sound odd, but its a matter of pride for me. I mean to be able to sustain my life without public assistence so far.

That is not to say that if circumstances were such that I had no choice that I wouldn't accept the help.. Of course, most any of us would..

Injury or some other medical condition that would prohibit me from working to earn a living,,, yeah, for those people, I'm really glad we have programs to assist them.

Again, maybe it's me or just the way I was raised, but I guess I always thought standing on my own two feet was the right thing to do.

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I would love nothing better than when the time comes, to not have to accept Social Security (that's if it still exists that is) I'd love to say,, no thank you.

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You shouldn't feel that way. You've paid into it your entire working life. That's not public assistance.

Why would you say no to money that you earned and paid into? You might as well turn down the next check somebody gives you. It would be the exact same thing.