In which a childless couple dreaming of a little one of their very own tries fertility treatments and hits the jackpot. Except (a) there’s no couple involved, (b) mom already had six kids, all by in vitro, not fertility drugs, and (c) her need for more children appears to be pathological. To the point where she had eight embryos implanted this time because, and I quote, she wanted “just one more girl.”

But other than that, it’s straight out of a storybook.

Angela Suleman said her daughter always had trouble conceiving and underwent in vitro fertilization treatments [in the past] because her fallopian tubes are “plugged up.”

There were frozen embryos left over after her previous pregnancies and her daughter didn’t want them destroyed, so she decided to have more children.

Nadya Suleman wanted to have children since she was a teenager, “but luckily she couldn’t,” her mother said.

“She doesn’t have any more (frozen embryos), so it’s over now,” she said. “It has to be.”…

“Instead of becoming a kindergarten teacher or something, she started having them, but not the normal way,” he mother said.

Her daughter’s obsession with children caused Angela Suleman considerable stress, so she sought help from a psychologist, who told her to order her daughter out of the house.

Nadya allegedly told a neighbor she was paid to have the IVF done but didn’t elaborate. Her college major, incidentally? “Child and adolescent development.” Exit question one: Time for DSS to step in here? Exit question two: Time for a certain as-yet-unnamed in-vitro specialist to lose his medical license for agreeing to implant eight embryos into a woman with six kids? (Assuming he has one, that is. There’s no “back-alley IVF” industry, is there?) The LA Times has answers to both: “The California Medical Board, which investigates doctors, and the California Department of Public Health, which licenses clinics and hospitals, said no doctors or facilities are currently being investigated regarding the births. It is also unlikely that the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services would get involved unless it receives a complaint of child abuse or neglect.”

Update: We’re talking about welfare in the comments, but another possibility presents itself. Did she do it to get rich?

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, since 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.

A spokesman for a fertility clinic in Georgia interviewed for the piece claims they’d draw scrutiny from the industry watchdog if they implanted more than two or three embryos into a patient at a time.