Nadya Suleman's Fertility Doctor Has License Revoked

Anyone who’s seen a few minutes of a Nadya Suleman TV interview can tell that something is amiss — and we only possess the kind of medical degrees that allow tabloid editors to diagnose pregnancies from paparazzi pics (which is to say, none). Yet fertility specialist Dr. Michael Kamrava says he ignored medical conventions and implanted Nadya Suleman with 12 embryos simply because she insisted. Now that decision has cost him his medical license.

Today the Medical Board of California announced that Kamrava’s license will be revoked as of July 1, the Associated Press reports. In February, a judge recommended that the doctor should be put on five years of probation, as he was unlikely to make the same mistake again. However, the board said it “adamantly” disagrees, since Suleman’s case isn’t an isolated incident. “This is not a one-patient case or a two-patient case; it is a three-patient case and the established causes of discipline include repeated negligent acts,” read the board’s decision.

Kamrava says he implanted Suleman with six times as many embryos as is normal for a woman her age because she promised to reduce if too many became viable. The board responded:

“A fetal reduction procedure has risks, including the loss of all pregnancy, and to assign even a scintilla of responsibility to a patient who becomes pregnant and then elects not to follow through with a procedure that may jeopardize her (and possibly her family’s) prized objective is troubling and telling.”

We’re all well aware of the outcome of Suleman’s pregnancy, but the two other cases are also troubling. Kamrava transferred seven embryos to a 48-year-old patient. One fetus died before birth, and the woman went on to have quadruplets. The doctor detected atypical cells, which can be a sign of a tumor, in another patient, but performed in vitro fertilization anyway. Later the woman was diagnosed with stage-three cancer and had to have her uterus and ovaries removed.

Kamrava has said he knows he made a mistake in all of these cases, and even cried during an apology in court last year. Thankfully the board decided that it shouldn’t take a public scandal for a doctor to realize this kind of behavior is dangerous.