In the latest episode of the show “The Doctors”, Nadya Suleman, who now goes by Natalie, says she no longer wants to be known as “Octomom” eight years after she gave birth to octuplets. For those of you who might not remember, Natalie gave birth to octuplets in 2009. She already had 6 other children via IVF. She started on IVF when she was only 21 years old and resulted in 6 pregnancies. She was also on government assistance to support those 6 kids and decided to go ahead in 2008 and use the remaining 6 embryos from her previous IVF cycles and her Doctor added 6 more for a total of 12 implanted eggs. It resulted in the octuplets and she was living off the government and donations from strangers in order to survive. Once the story got out that she was unemployed and that she had that many children from IVF, people started to pull donations and money dried up.
Once money started to become a bigger issue, Natalie had to made some decisions about how she was going to support her family. She did the talk show circuit which brought a lot of negative attention on her family. She went on to pose semi-nude on the cover of the UK magazine “Closer” and then starred in an adult film. She did appearances at men’s club throughout the United States. Suleman was accused of welfare fraud by the state of California for failing to disclose nearly $30,000 in earnings. she pleaded no contest to a single count of misdemeanor welfare fraud for failing to disclose income she was receiving from videos and personal appearances while collecting more than $26,000 in public assistance funds to care for her 14 children. This public persona became her way to make money and soon it began to take a toll on her personal life. She finally checked into rehab to help deal with the stress and anxiety.
She began to hate that public persona and soon fell out of the spotlight. She told Dr. Travis Stork, that “Rather than go get more public assistance, which I already felt ashamed of, I ended up selling myself out,” she says. “At the time, it was like an investment so that I could support my family. I believe the judgment I experienced was warranted because what were people supposed to believe? All they were being fed by the media was negativity.”
She has focused on moving on with her life and has worked hard to try to remove her and her family from that image. She goes on to say the kids have not been affected by her public “Octomom” persona. She tells the doctor, ““I own and take responsibility for my poor choices, but it’s certainly doesn’t take away from how extraordinary these kids ended up turning out to be.”
