The mother of the woman who used a fertility doctor to give birth to octuplets despite already having six young children called her daughter’s actions “unconscionable”.
Angela Suleman is caring for the six older children while her daughter Nadya is in hospital after giving birth on January 26th to the octuplets.
“She already has six beautiful children, why would she do this?” Angela Suleman said in the videotaped interview with celebrity news website RadarOnline.com.
“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.”
Nadya Suleman’s publicist, Mike Furtney, said his client has been away for nearly two months, so should not be held responsible for the home’s current condition.
Mr Furtney said his client planned to move into a larger home once the octuplets were healthy enough to leave 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.
Angela Suleman said Nadya’s boyfriend was the biological father of all 14 children but that she refused to marry him.
Nadya Suleman, a divorced single mother, told NBC's Todayshow that the same fertility specialist provided in-vitro fertilisation for all 14 of her children.
But Angela Suleman seemed to contradict that account, saying the fertility specialist who helped her daughter give birth to the octuplets was a different doctor from the one who aided in the birth of her first six children.
Angela Suleman said she and her husband pleaded with Nadya’s first fertility doctor not to treat their daughter again, so Nadya found another doctor to work with.
“I’m really angry about that,” Angela Suleman said of the doctor’s decision to perform the procedure.
A Medical Board of California spokeswoman said on Friday that it was investigating the doctor - who has not been identified - to see if there was a “violation of the standard of care”.
Angela Suleman also challenged her daughter’s remarks in the NBC interview that she always wanted a large family to make up for the loneliness she felt as an only child.
“We raised her in a loving family and her father always spoiled her,” her mother said.
PA