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.

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