‘Octomom’ says she was drugged when she consented to IVF procedure

LOS ANGELES — Octuplets mom Nadya Suleman told celebrity doctor Drew Pinksy in an interview that she was drugged when she signed a consent form giving her fertility doctor permission to transfer 12 embryos.

“He wrote something, he gave it to me to sign,” Suleman said during the HLN interview Thursday night. “I signed it, and I didn’t read it.”

She said she was on a “cocktail of drugs,” including Valium for treatment of health problems.

The California Medical Board on July 1 revoked the medical license of Beverly Hills fertility doctor Michael Kamrava. The panel ruled that Kamrava “did not exercise sound judgment” in the transfer of 12 embryos to Suleman. Kamrava was accused by the attorney general’s office of being grossly negligent in his treatment of Suleman and two other female patients: a 48-year-old who suffered complications after she became pregnant with quadruplets and a 42-year-old diagnosed with advanced ovarian cancer after receiving fertility treatments.

Suleman gained notoriety after she gave birth to octuplets in January 2009. She was a single mother, living on public assistance and she already had six children. All 14 of her children were conceived through in vitro fertilization.

Suleman became widely known as “Octomom” and told Pinksy that she was speaking out to rebut being made into a “parody without permission.”

“I have the spotlight, I know it’s my responsibility [for my kids] to brush it away and get rid of the Octomom character,” she said in the interview.