Los Angeles  - Controversy grew Tuesday about Nadya Suleman, the single mother of octuplets who now has 14 children under the age of 8.

Though Suleman has claimed she is able to support her huge brood and did not take welfare payments, reports said that she received food stamps for her six older children and social security payments for three children with disabilities.

Suleman also told NBC that she had no income besides student loans and that she paid over 100,000 dollars of her own money to get the fertility treatment that led to the octuplets.

The reports also said that the estimated 1.5-to-3-million-dollar hospital bill for the complicated Caesarean delivery will be picked up by the state-run medical fund Medicaid.

"Do you have any income at all?" NBC journalist Ann Curry asked Suleman during her exclusive interview with the 33-year-old woman.

"At the moment, no," Suleman replied, adding that she intended to use student loans "temporarily" to pay for her family's care.

"I'm responsible. I am not on welfare," Suleman told Curry. "I don't want to disparage or seem like I'm disparaging any individual who uses welfare as a form of a resource. It can be a valuable resource. I've chosen never to go on welfare. I feel that it is my responsibility to do what I can to provide for my children."

But according to The Los Angeles Times, three of her older children have disabilities and receive supplemental security income. In addition, Suleman reportedly receives
490 dollars a month in food stamps from the state of California.

The new information emerged just a day after Suleman's mother called her action "unconscionable." Suleman lived with her six small children in the house of her mother, but never contributed to rent or food, her mother Angela Suleman said.

"She really has no idea what she's doing to her children and to me," Suleman said. "I'm really tired of taking care of those six. I really need (Nadya) to think of what she's going to do and how she's going to provide for all these children."

She said the humble three bedroom home in which she lived with her husband, daughter and six kids was already overcrowded. Video images on radaronline. com showed a bedroom packed with bunk beds and piles of clothes spilling from the closet.

"We're there all crowded in. The master bedroom has a big bed and two little cribs and the other bedroom has one bed and one crib and there is one bedroom with bunk beds that I had gotten before, so it's pretty crowded. But the children are wonderful, beautiful children and I love them dearly. I would never let anything happen to them, so I'm taking care of them and I have been."

"I don't know what the future will bring, because, hopefully Nadya will get some living accommodations - because it's a really small house."

Angela Suleman said her daughter was irresponsible with money and ignored her retired mother's financial needs.

"The house is full of toys," she said. "My daughter has always spent a lot of money on toys and really not helping out with the children or the living arrangements - never paid anything for rent.

She said that when she first heard that Nadya was trying to get pregnant again she intervened with Nadya's fertility doctors, who agreed to stop treating her, but that Nadya found another doctor.

That statement contradicted Nadya's claims in the NBC interview that the same doctor had performed the fertility treatments that led to all her pregnancies.

NBC named the fertility center as the West Coast IVF Clinic in Beverley Hills. The Medical Board of California announced last week that it was conducting an investigation to see if her fertility treatment violated medical ethics. The Los Angeles Times reported that the doctor in question had one of the lowest success rates of all US fertility clinics, but that his treatments of Suleman worked every time.

In her interview Nadya acknowledged that she was "fixated" about having a huge family. Though she knew of the challenges of having more babies with six young children to care for, she wanted to use the embryos she had and never thought that all of them would develop, she said. "The most I would have ever anticipated would have been twins," she said. dpa