Grandmother and mother cross swords over octuplets

In a videotaped squabble with her mother posted on a gossip website, the woman who gave birth to octuplets said she had no choice but to use the embryos she had because her only other option was to destroy them.

“I’m not going to destroy the embryos, period. Done, done, done,” Nadya Suleman told her mother in an interview videotaped last week and posted by RadarOnline.com. “You can’t go back and alter the past.”

Angela Suleman had told her daughter that “you should have considered your six other children” before going through the in vitro fertilisation procedure that led to her to give birth to another eight children last month.

“They were frozen and you did not have to do anything,” Angela Suleman said.

“They were lives,” her daughter responded. “... You either use them or destroy them.”

Nadya Suleman said donating the embryos to someone else was not an option. “I couldn’t even fathom the idea of having my own children out in the world” without knowing them, she said.

Ms Suleman has said six embryos were implanted for each of her six pregnancies, including four single births and one set of twins. In her last pregnancy, two of the six embryos split to create eight babies.

The fertility treatments appear to violate national guidelines that specify no more than two embryos for a healthy woman under 35.