What should have been a happy event for a California woman who last week gave birth to octuplets was soon eclipsed by questions from medical experts regarding in vitro fertilization.

The story of 33-year-old Nadya Suleman, who was already a mother of six children under 8 when she delivered eight more babies, six boys and two girls, continues to be the focus of media attention as well as medical experts, ethicists and pro-life activists who are questioning the judgment of both the mother and the doctors who treated the woman.

The national discussion all over television, coffee shops and the Internet rages over whether this was actually a cuddly family a-bloom or medical science run amok.

Dr. Robert Stillman, the medical director at Shady Grove Fertility Center in Rockville, Md., the largest fertility clinic by volume in the country, said he is disturbed by the fact that multiple embryos were implanted in Suleman.
 
“I think the transfer of so many embryos, even if the patient wants them, is a breach of our professional society’s guidelines by a wide margin,” Stillman told CNSNews.com.

Practice committee guidelines published by the American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM) note that a multiple pregnancy (three or more implanted embryos) is an undesirable outcome because of the increased risk of complications to the fetuses and the mother. ASRM also specifies that women under 35 should get no more than 2 embryos.

However, Suleman managed to find a practitioner who implanted her with eight embryos at once after she insisted on having “just one more girl,” her mother, Angela Suleman, told reporters on Jan. 30.

Andrew Light, director of Center for Global Ethics at George Mason University questioned the ethics of Suleman’s fertility clinic.
 
“Transferring that many embryos increases the risk of harming the mother and the children,” Light said. “It’s unethical for doctors to do this.”

Now, Suleman, a single mother who still lives with her parents in a two-bedroom house, has the eight new babies, plus an earlier set of twins and four other children, for a total of 14. Six of the children are between the ages of 2 and 7.

Reports emerged over the last couple of days saying Suleman is being flooded with offers for interviews, television appearances and even to become a baby expert or host a TV show. Eager to tell her story and set the record straight, the most sought-after mother at the time was rumored to take on a $2 million offer from the queen of talk shows herself, Oprah Winfrey.

One of Suleman’s newly-hired publicists said that her client, who currently remains hospitalized in a Los Angeles clinic, was weighing up the offers, adding that raising eight children is expensive. She did not specify how much money might be involved in some of the offers.

“Right now her top priority is to be the best mom she can be to all her children,” Suleman’s publicist Joann Killeen said.