What do you call a person who is nuts about babies, a kidomaniac? Nadya Suleman, 33, recently gave birth to eight healthy babies - six boys and two girls - in Bellflower, California Hospital. Suleman, who isn’t married, has six other children and got pregnant this time around using in vitro fertilization.

But now Californians are starting to wonder whether this was the `midwinter miracle’ they originally thought it to be. As more details of the Suleman family unravel the more disturbing the story gets. It turns out that Suleman is not the hapless infertile woman who sought medical help to conceive.

Suleman - who is currently living with her parents - already has six children and can barely support her existing family, let alone the octuplets! Paul Harris, New York for The Observer said it best when he said that her current family with the additional eight babies now give her enough offspring to field a football team with three substitutes.

Her family has indicated that she may be suffering from a serious mental condition. The condition at one time has forced Suleman to seek the help of a psychologist, who actually recommended she should be ordered out of the house.

Her mother now feels guilty not having followed the psychologist’s order and admits that she might not have had so many babies had she ordered her out. Reputed doctors find it hard to believe that a physically healthy mother of six was allowed to have fertility treatment.

The family of 14 now resides in their modest three-bedroom suburban home in Whittier, a town near Los Angeles. In spite of what some people may consider as a blessing Nadya Suleman’s father, Edward, is bitter about the whole scenario and did not wish to speak to the media. Their only hope seems to be a publishing contract.

Their financial records suggest that they can barely support the six children and are ill prepared for the eight new. In fact San Bernardino court records indicate that Suleman’s mother filed for bankruptcy last year, claiming $1m in liabilities as a result of a bad housing investment.

The records have unearthed another controversy in the family indicating that the man Suleman was married to may not be the father of the first six children, because the divorce filing indicates no children were produced from the marriage! Birth certificates name one `David Solomon’ as the father of her eldest four children while the father of the octuplates is still unknown and is believed to be the result of the sperm donated by a friend.

According to a neighbor her previous six children were also the result of in vitro fertilization, using sperm donated by a friend and the left over was frozen and used for the octuplets! Moreover Suleman has been living with her parents for the past six years. Her parents who are still together turns out to be divorced having been legally separated in Las Vegas in 1999.

Neighbours have reported that she worked as a psychiatric technician before she began having children. After that, she attended college, studying child development. But more mysterious is how she got pregnant. Suleman was already three months pregnant when she first walked into Kaiser Permanente, where a 46-strong medical team delivered her eight children.

“Our patient was counseled regarding her options for the pregnancy. The options were to continue the pregnancy or selectively abort. The patient chose to continue the pregnancy,” said Dr. Harold Henry with Kaiser Permanente. Yet it is clear that the fertility clinic was clearly going against current medical practice. Usually only one or two embryos are implanted in such young mothers due to the likelihood of all embryos taking hold.

Arthur Wisot, a fertility doctor in Los Angeles, raised a further prospect. Why Suleman was allowed to keep all eight embryos once they took hold in her womb, at huge risk to the babies as well as to the mother, is also being questioned, even having triplets puts a woman and her babies at huge risk of death or serious injury.