By Kimi Yoshino, Los Angeles Times –
LOS ANGELES — Despite dire financial straits, octuplets mother Nadya Suleman said she is still capable of being a good mother and supporting her brood of 14 children.
In an interview with Matt Lauer on the “Today” show Thursday, the Orange County, Calif., woman acknowledged that she is accepting food stamps as a temporary measure to make ends meet.
Suleman, who had vowed not to accept public assistance, said she has been accepting $2,000 a month in food stamps for the last two months. She said she has business ventures in the works to make money, including an online “Octomom TV” project and the release of a horror movie she starred in, “Millenium.”
“I’m working as hard as I possibly can to support them,” she said.
In response to a question about her financial condition deteriorating to the point that social services may be forced to break up her family, Suleman said, “That will never happen. I can guarantee you of that.”
She said she has proven people wrong for more than three years by caring for her children, including potty training the octuplets on her own.
“It’s sick and sad and to me, unbelievably fascinating in regard to humanity, how many people are foaming at the mouth that my children be taken away from me,” Suleman told Lauer. She said she doesn’t expect that to change — even 15 years from now when the octuplets are 18.
Suleman is also facing foreclosure on her La Habra home, but her attorney recently told City News Service that those proceedings could be delayed until late April.
The octuplets were born on Jan. 26, 2009, and have become the world’s longest-surviving octuplets. Suleman was quickly dubbed “Octomom” and turned into a symbol of the excesses of assisted reproduction.
A single mother, she already had six other children.
Her Beverly Hills fertility specialist, Dr. Michael Kamrava, was stripped of his medical license last year by the state medical board, which ruled that he had violated professional standards by implanting Suleman with 12 embryos she had kept in storage.
