Before the octuplet mom, Nadya Suleman, even left the hospital, said Ellen Goodman in The Boston Globe, “the whole country had gone from ‘Gee whiz!’ to ‘Are you kidding?’” What was originally heralded as a medical miracle is now an ethical morass: Turns out Suleman, 33 and single, already had six kids; all 14 children were conceived using a sperm donor; and “for good measure," she's unemployed.
She can’t work because her back was injured on the job, during a 1999 mental-hospital riot, said Mike Fleeman and Howard Breuer in People, for which she’s collected $168,000 in disability pay. And her explanation for the large brood is equally prosaic: In a new NBC interview, she said she’s always dreamed of having “a large family, a huge family,” perhaps due to a “dysfunctional” upbringing as an only child.
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